


Iron Woman

by NuMo



Series: Iron Woman [1]
Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F, Iron Man AU, Marvel Cinematic Universe AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:33:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 44,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22694857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NuMo/pseuds/NuMo
Summary: Myka Bering applies to be the personal assistant of newly minted CEO of Wells Industries, Helena Wells. Then things get complicated.
Relationships: Myka Bering/Helena "H. G." Wells
Series: Iron Woman [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1632445
Comments: 147
Kudos: 136





	1. Mid-March 2008

“So, Miss Bering. Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself?”

Myka tried hard not to roll her eyes at the predictability of that question. This wasn’t her first interview – unlike most interviews she’d had, though, this one wasn’t really for a job she needed; not _need_ need as such. But who wouldn’t be intrigued by a job at Wells Industries, the world’s single largest company? Even if it was ‘just’ a personal assistant position – it was the personal assistant of the CEO, Helena Wells, who was new enough in her job that her office showed not a single sign of personality. Or maybe she wanted it that way. Wells was British, not American; maybe that was how offices looked on the other side of the Atlantic. And maybe this was an acceptable opening gambit in Britain, even if Myka found it predictable. It did serve its purpose, after all.

“I went to pre-med and pre-law before-,” Myka started into her spiel, hoping to sound not too routine, when Wells interrupted her with an irritable gesture.

“Yes, yes, it says so on your CV, which I _have_ read. What I meant was to get to know your character.” Wells tilted her head in scrutiny. “If you’re to be my assistant, I want to know what kind of person you are. As in, can you hold up your end of a conversation? Can you plan ahead, discern the important from the unimportant? Do you read, and if so, which authors?”

The last question startled Myka enough that she decided to start with it. “I love books,” she said quickly, trying to keep from blushing at how awkward it sounds. “I practically grew up in a bookstore, and I work in another one now,” she continued. Was there an appreciative glimmer in the woman’s eyes? Well, she _was_ Helena G. Wells, related (as rumor had it) to the famous English author. “I read everything my eyes land on,” Myka went on, “up to and including the backs of shampoo bottles in hotel bathrooms. But my favorite genre has to be science fiction.”

There _was_ a glimmer in Wells’ eyes now, Myka was sure. “I would ask your favorite authors,” Wells said, leaning forward and lightly tapping her pen on her desk, “provided you don’t butter up and say ‘H.G. Wells’ – I don’t have much patience for-”

“But his works are good!” Myka protested, too defensive of the author she loved to be able to hold back. “So far ahead of his time in so many ways.” She snapped her mouth shut – if Wells saw this as ‘buttering up’, she’d better change track. “I do appreciate female writers,” she went on, and thought she saw the glimmer grow stronger, “starting with Mary Shelley, of course, but also LeGuin, Duane, Butler, Atwood…”

“An impressive list,” Wells replied, “and in reverse alphabetical order, I notice.”

Myka blinked. She hadn’t even noticed that herself, nor planned on it. To have someone else point such a thing out to her was… unprecedented. “Not exhaustive, of course,” she said, almost as an afterthought. 

“To be sure,” Wells said dryly. Then she raised her hands in a small conciliatory gesture. “I didn’t mean to sound patronizing. My apologies, Miss Bering.”

Myka gritted her teeth for a brief moment and then decided the best way was to nip this right now – if Wells took the request badly, the job as her personal assistant probably wasn’t the right fit anyway. “I’m sorry, but it’s Ms. Bering,” she said firmly. “I’m not sure how this is handled in Great Britain,” she added, as a way of giving Wells an out if necessary, “but ‘Miss’ isn’t really used anymore over here. Nor is ‘Mrs.’ – it’s Ms. in both cases.” She took great care to enunciate the honorific properly – the situation wouldn’t be helped if Wells didn’t hear the difference.

“Ah.” Wells’ eyebrows rose. “Fascinating.” She made a note on a notepad that almost overflowed with similar scribbles. Even upside down, her handwriting seemed clear and precise – definitely a bonus for a personal assistant, Myka thought. Cursive, too, which was more than a bonus – it was impressive. “It is just such detail that I expect from my personal assistant,” Wells continued, and Myka snapped her attention back to the conversation. “Separated by a common language, as they say – I shall need your translation services every now and then, I’m sure. Communication is a major component of what I do.”

“Of course,” Myka said with a quick nod. “And since we’re on the topic – what exactly does the job entail? The ad stated ‘tasks to be determined by mutual agreement’, which could mean… well, anything, really.” And had it been a male CEO’s ad, it would have sounded… off, and that would have been the best-case scenario. Worst case… Myka wrenched her thoughts away from that. Then again, she had reminded herself, there was no reason a female CEO couldn’t mean it exactly like that too. 

“Ah,” Wells said again. She nodded and leaned back in her seat with a small smile. “Well. As I understand it, personal assistants manage those tasks their employer delegates to them – tasks which, typically, they don’t want to do themselves, yes?”

Myka nodded, unsure where this was going. This still wasn’t enough specification, not by far; that much was clear.

“For example,” Wells went on, “I _detest_ calendars, so you shall keep track of that for me. When I do have an appointment with someone I don’t yet know, I expect a brief about them to be on my desk, morning of at the very latest. You shall need to manage my correspondence, too; it is appalling how many emails land in my inbox every hour of the day.” Wells halted, briefly biting the corner of her lower lip. Then she inhaled sharply through her nose and leaned forward again. “Frankly, Ms. Bering, I’m at a disadvantage here, being the foreign, female, and very newly minted CEO of one of the world’s largest companies, and I need someone… in my corner, isn’t that how it’s put?”

Again, Myka nodded. Then she remembered herself enough to smile and say, “Yes, um… yes, it is.” She had noticed the corrected form of address – a mark on the positive side, as was Wells’ honesty, as confusing as it was.

Wells flashed her a brief smile in return, then continued, “I did not get into this position purely by happenstance, of course; I have plenty of skills that shall serve me well. However, in the few days since I moved into this office…” her indifferent gesture encompassed the laptop on the otherwise bare glass desk, the floor-length windows, the non-descript carpet, the mostly-empty shelves, “let’s just say there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and there are tasks that I definitely intend to, _need_ to, put into capable hands.” She tapped her pen on Myka’s CV. “I am well aware that you have a business degree as well as your two ‘pre’ experiences. And your Secret Service training. I have to say, I’m impressed by the breadth of talent and knowledge this implies, and I have no doubt that means your hands _are_ capable. As I said initially, though, I’m much more interested in seeing if we gel – I can’t abide the thought of allowing someone such intimate access to my life whom I dislike, or who bores me. Are you a bore, Ms. Bering?”

Myka blinked. “I’ve never been asked this in an interview before,” she said before she could stop herself. She bit her tongue. Twice now, she’d blurted out something – what if Ms. Wells would interpret that as Myka being unable to keep her mouth shut? PAs had to be discreet above all else. Feeling the tips of her ears redden, she looked for hints that this would mean the end of the interview, but found none – on the contrary, Wells was tilting her head and raising her eyebrow, clearly expecting more of an answer. Myka cleared her throat to buy herself a little time. “I mean… I guess boring means something different depending who you’re talking to, right?” Wells moved her head minutely; something between a ‘go on’ and a nod. So Myka continued. “You asked earlier if I could hold my own in a conversation – most cases, that answer is yes, although I’ll admit I haven’t got a clue about comic books.”

“Comic books?” Wells asked, both eyebrows now high over amusedly glinting eyes.

Myka shrugged. “Apparently these days you can’t consider yourself well-read if you exclude them, so I figure I’d put that out there from the start.”

Wells nodded, and the corners of her mouth crinkled upwards. “Duly noted.”

“I mean I do work in a bookstore,” Myka added, “and we do sell comic books and graphic novels, but knowing which aisle to point people to is pretty much the extent of my expertise.”

“I see,” Wells replied. Her smile had deepened, though, so Myka reasoned it wasn’t a bad ‘I see’. “I’ll admit to being intrigued, though,” Wells went on, “how a person with your expertise ended up in a bookstore in Malibu, California?”

Myka shifted a little in her seat. This, too, was an expectable question, and her answer wasn’t what most people would like to hear. Then again, Wells didn’t seem like ‘most people’. “There was an… incident,” she said, “in Washington, almost two years ago now. During my time in the Secret Service.” She briefly pondered adding that it hadn’t been her fault – the investigation had been clear about that – but then decided against it, decided against adding anything more, in fact. Let Wells ask if she wanted to know. “After that,” she went on, “I… needed to change track. The Secret Service is a high-stakes job; literally life and death. I figured I would work for a while in a job with lower stakes, get my feet back under me, and go on from there.”

Wells’ face was inscrutable. “Surely you are aware, though, of the stakes of working as my personal assistant – not quite life and death, certainly, but also not along the lines of St. Clair Books, either. Are the stakes there too low already, after not even two years?”

Myka felt herself flush, _again_. This, too, was an expectable question – the one expectable question that she really didn’t have a good answer to, in fact. She wouldn’t have thought Wells would let the matter of what exactly happened in the Secret Service drop so completely or so quickly, but maybe she was saving it for later. In the meantime, Myka had to find an answer that wasn’t disloyal to her current employer, enticing to her potential new one, and true enough to deliver it convincingly. She’d failed to do so in the mirror every evening since she’d applied for the job, and now her thoughts were racing.

“I’m going to answer this in a bit of a roundabout way,” she said slowly. Wells made another ‘go on’ gesture. “Wells Industries is the world’s largest company, _and_ it’s run by a woman,” Myka continued. “When I read about your appointment as CEO, I thought how challenging this has got be – not just as a woman, but as someone with a different cultural background, someone as young as you are-” Wells’ eyebrows rose at the same rate that Myka’s heart sank, but she forged on, “-someone with as little connections, on this continent anyway,” she added belatedly.

Wells’ eyebrows stayed where they were, and so did Myka’s heart. “You’ve been doing your research,” Wells said, face and voice still unreadable.

Myka took in a breath. “It’s what I do,” she said, releasing it. “I like to be prepared.”

“And so you applied to… aid me in my challenge?”

‘I need someone in my corner,’ Myka remembered, hoping against hope that her ramblings were going in a good direction. “In a way, yes,” she replied. “I’ve had my share of not being taken seriously, of being spoken over, being _passed_ over. But also because I wanted to see how business is done, here at the top.” It wasn’t the most elegant of replies, but it had the benefit of being the honest truth. “High stakes and all,” she dared to add.

And it made Wells laugh out loud – just the once, and quite dryly. “I appreciate your candor,” she said then, and grew serious again. “I take it, then, that this position is not necessarily the pinnacle of your career ambitions?”

Myka bit her lip. “If we’re being honest,” she said, mentally haranguing herself for letting the conversation getting anywhere near this, “then no. I mean, don’t get me wrong: if you hire me, I’ll give this job everything I have. I wouldn’t be sitting here if that wasn’t my intention. But after seeing how a government agency conducts its business and then contrasting that to how a small bookstore is run, I wondered how different it’s going to be in a large corporation, and when I saw your ad, I figured that this could be my way to finding out. After all, there isn’t any corporation larger than this one.”

“With the ultimate goal of going into business yourself?”

Myka hesitated a moment, but that glint was back in Wells’ eyes – if Myka had to put a name to it, it was appreciation. _In for a penny, in for a pound,_ she thought to herself and nodded. “Yes,” she said, and added quickly, “with the operative word being ‘ultimate’. I don’t have a fixed idea of when, or of what kind of business. But yes, at some point I’d like to sit on the other side of the desk.” She nodded to the sleek glass surface Wells was sitting behind. “But,” she said, intent on making that point clear, “that’s still future plans, way into the future. Again, I wouldn’t be sitting here if I didn’t intend to give you one hundred percent.”

Wells nodded slowly. Her expression hadn’t changed. Then she smiled. “Well, I certainly appreciate your honesty _and_ your ambition, Ms. Bering. I have very little patience for people whose talents aren’t matched by their impetus. As for what you’ll learn while you’re working for me, I’m sure there will be contractual obligations for you not to use or abuse any of my trade secrets in your eventual endeavors.”

Myka felt her ears redden yet again. Again, she cursed herself – she should have seen this coming, should have mentioned it herself. “Of course not.”

Wells gestured dismissively. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. Then she turned on Myka one of the most piercing looks Myka had ever received. “So, what do I know about you at this point?” she said, almost musingly tapping the side of her jaw. “You’re ambitious and forthright, you like to be prepared and do your due diligence towards that goal; you lack expertise on comic books but you are not a bore – anything else that I should be aware of?”

Myka shrugged with a small smile. “I don’t cook and I’m not a foodie; so please don’t ask me where you can get the best sandwich in L.A.,” she said. “Unless you’re prepared to wait a couple minutes till I’ve had time to google,” she added. 

Wells’ smile deepened. “Again, duly noted.” 

“If you want to know the top ten places for a proper cup of tea, though, or to buy loose leaf, I do have those already. Research, as you said.” In this context, surely Wells wouldn’t see that as buttering up, would she? It was due diligence. Maybe a bit more. Potentially stereotyping her. But not buttering up. Was it?

Wells’ eyebrows rose higher than they had before. “Now _that_ ,” she said with a short laugh and a pointed pen, “is commendable initiative.” She pulled a stapled-together stack of paper towards her and stood up, signaling for Myka to do the same. “Head over to one of those tea places, then, and have that cup while you read through your contract. I trust your engagement at St. Clair Books will not be a hindrance.” It was a statement, not a question – Wells was used to getting what she wanted. Myka watched Wells tilt her head and narrow her eyes speculatively. “I’d say you might enjoy a cup of… Assam. Bold, brisk, dark. A dash of milk; just the merest hint. No sugar. Am I right?”

Again, Myka blinked. This was _it?_ What about talking to other applicants? What about taking some time to decide? And what about that tea prediction? That one, at least, was easy to reply to. “Yunnan, actually,” she said weakly, then cleared her throat and went on, “but when a place doesn’t have that, yes, it’s Assam. With, uh, with a bit of milk, yes. And,” she cleared her throat, “and yes, I can start immediately. Rebecca actually encouraged me to apply for this job.”

“Aces,” Wells replied. “Do bring me a half a pound of that… Yunnan, you said?, when you come back.” When Myka nodded wordlessly, Wells beamed. “Excellent. I’m most intrigued.” 

She was, also, still holding out the contract expectantly. Myka gave herself a little shake and took it. “Alright,” she said. A smile grew on her face, mirroring the one on the face of Helena G. Wells.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! Have a surprise chapter two!

“ _No_ , Mister MacPherson, I expect you to show me _all_ the files, not just those you deem fit,” Wells spat into the phone. Myka tried to make herself as inconspicuous as possible; the woman had called her in after Myka had knocked, so that meant it was probably okay that Myka caught the tail end of this conversation, right? 

Right?

“On my desk, all of it,” Wells went on in a steely voice. “Every single project that Wells Industries is currently developing, every project that’s been turned into a product, every project that’s been abandoned, every project that doesn’t fall into any of these categories. Every idea that isn’t a project yet. E-ver-y-thing. Do I make myself clear?” Wells barely waited for a reply before snapping, “Tomorrow, in my inbox. See to it.” She poked the button that would end the call and stared darkly at the phone for a moment. “Nothing like as satisfying as slamming a receiver on the hook,” she muttered, shaking her head, and Myka remembered that this was the third phone, the third actual physical device, on Wells’ desk in as many weeks – the others had been thrown across the room, slammed on the tabletop, and in one memorable instance, cracked in its owner’s palm.

With a shake of her head and a sharp inhale and exhale, Wells looked up at Myka and smiled. “My apologies,” she said, in far more conciliatory tones that rang as fake as her smile did. “The former CEO seems to have a hard time accepting the ‘former’ part of his job description.”

Myka swallowed. She’d already witnessed her fair share of clashes between Wells and MacPherson, and at least one of them had ended in an untimely phone demise. “Why don’t-” she stopped herself. It wasn’t her place.

Wells looked at her, head tilted, eyes shrewd. “You seem to have a solution for this dilemma, Ms. Bering.” 

This time, Myka actually gulped. “It’s not my place,” she said, looking down and to the side. 

“Balderdash.”

Myka’s eyes flew up to meet Wells’ in surprise and saw that Wells had left her desk. “Wh-” she began, but Wells was already talking again, walking towards her and gesticulating.

“Over the past weeks,” Wells said, “you have exhibited a good, fast-thinking head for business, Ms. Bering. And you’re an astute judge of character, almost as good as I am. So out with it.” Wells ended up barely a foot from Myka, both hands on her hips. 

Myka blinked. Then, catching herself, she nodded and narrowed her eyes. “My first impulse was wondering why you don’t fire him,” she said slowly, “but then I realized there has to be something in his contract, or you would’ve already done so.”

Wells’ nostrils flared. “He does indeed have the right to a three-month handover period,” she grated. “I can even see the sense of that, from a certain point of view. If he were less of an ass, it would probably be a very useful statute, but as it is…” She pursed her lips and glowered. 

Myka was quite happy that that glare, even though she was at its receiving end, wasn’t meant for her. “Maybe that is actually something you can get him on,” she mused with a frown. “Dereliction of duty, or something along the lines.” She shifted on her feet, going through a list of names in her head. “Hernandez,” she said finally. “Kelly Hernandez, from Legal’s HR team. She’s persistent – if anyone can find something and make it stick, she does.”

Wells bit the inside of her pursed lips for a moment – by now Myka knew this was a habit – then nodded. “Set her onto it,” she said, then turned and walked back to her desk. “And Ms. Bering?” She turned again, leaning back against the desk and gripping its glass top with both hands. 

“Yes?” Myka’s throat ran dry. The look Wells was giving her was hard to read; Myka had no idea if she’d overstepped – this _was_ the former CEO they were talking about, after all. British, like Wells herself. Who knew what kind of loyalty Wells might feel towards the man over her personal assistant?

“If, in the future, you have ideas on how I should deal with a situation…”

Again, Myka gulped. _Shit,_ she thought. _Shit, shit, shit, shit._

“… by all means bring them to me,” Wells finished. It was obvious that she was able to see how relief flooded Myka’s veins, because she smiled – a brief, but true one. “I did mean it when I said you had a head for business, and I also meant it when I said I needed someone in my corner,” Wells went on. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how large swathes of the corporate world perceive female CEOs.” She detached her hands to fold them in front of her, and crossed her legs at the ankles, looking at Myka with tilted head and a remnant of her smile. Then her expression turned serious again. “It was bad enough to discover that a large portion of Wells Industries’ products and services is made up of weapons manufacture and other war efforts. That was _never_ -” she broke off and shook her head. “Anyway, I have to understand all of it; the clients, the contracts, the penalties, the connections between the individual incorporated companies, _all of it_ , before I begin to take it in a different direction.”

Myka’s jaw had gone slack in the middle of that speech. _‘A large portion’? More like ‘ninety percent’_ , she thought. And then, _How can she not have known that?_ And only _then_ did she really hear the last sentence Wells had said, and her jaw actually dropped.

“I see you appreciate the magnitude of the endeavor,” Wells said with a small, predatory smile. “That kind of enterprise is not to be undertaken alone.” She stopped, apparently listening to her own words with impressed surprise. “Caturanga would be astounded to hear me say this,” she muttered to herself. Then she shook her head and looked at Myka again. “Ms. Bering, I’ve come to trust you, otherwise I would obviously not have spoken of this in your presence. I must impress upon you, though, the need for absolute secrecy on this.”

Myka nodded mutely, then cleared her throat and added, “Of course.” Her eyes flew briefly across the room. She knew there were no security cameras in this office – perks of being the CEO – but what if someone had bugged the place?

Wells noticed her sweep. She was almost as good at noticing details as Myka was herself. “Worried about listening devices?”

Myka had ceased to be surprised at how well Wells read people two weeks ago. She simply nodded. 

“I’ve had the place searched,” Wells said with another very dangerous smile. “And not just once,” she added. “There is not an electron moving in this office that I don’t know about.”

Myka nodded again. She knew better than to ask if Wells was sure, thanks to a very… memorable incident in her very first week. ‘If I’m not sure, I will not say such a thing,’ still rang in her ears. That had been one occasion where Wells’ glare _had_ been intended for her personal assistant, and Myka had sworn to herself that the number of those occasions would go to zero very very quickly.

“So now _that_ worry has been laid to rest,” Wells went on, “let me ask you if you know of anyone else who you would add to the team, as it were?”

Myka took a deep breath and called up another, longer list of names in her thoughts – easier than to wonder what she was getting herself into, what she _had gotten_ herself into, accepting this job. She hadn’t met all HQ employees yet, but she had seen or at the very least read up on the department heads, the important figures, and she’d tried to get a feel for who truly was important, and who was just a figurehead. “Jane Lattimer,” she said finally, “deputy head of civilian R&D under Hugo Miller. She’s been in the company for over twenty years; I’m sure she knows it inside and out, knows the networks and connections that we won’t see-”

“-because they aren’t written down or otherwise formalized anywhere,” Wells finished the sentence. She nodded her approval. “Anyone else?”

“Amanda Martin,” Myka suggested. “Deputy head of compliance under Bennett Sutton. I mean we both know how to read contracts, but she knows _everything_ about laws and regulations; she is _stellar_. Former Marine, too, so she knows the structures inside the military even if she’s not in that branch of operations at Wells Industries. Sutton is-” she bit off the words that were sitting on her tongue. 

“As I said,” Wells said, gesturing languidly, “out with it.” 

One day, Myka knew, these gestures, the sheer elegance of Helena George Wells (and the fact that she didn’t just share initials with Myka’s favorite author but her full middle and last names) would be… would be something that she’d have to address. Somehow. Maybe. Today, though, was not that day. “Seems to me that Sutton… doesn’t have a clue,” she said with pursed lips and a roll of her eyes and as much diplomacy as she was capable of. “From what I can see so far, he’s good at one thing: taking something that someone else has done or said and making it sound like his ideas.”

“Let me guess,” Wells said with a sigh, “who does the actual work in that department?” She shifted her weight, cocked her head, and leaned back, hands gripping the corners of her desk.

“Ms. Martin,” Myka nodded. 

“Of course.” Wells exhaled half scoff, half another sigh. “Who else? Mister Nielsen?”

How Arthur Nielsen had landed the job of head of public relations, no one seemed to know. He was friendly with MacPherson, although Myka had learned, from people who’d been with the company longer than both men, that this had come about only after he’d started his job. She frowned. “He is Mr. MacPherson’s best friend in this company, or as close as anyone can be in this context, I suppose. Why him?”

Wells shrugged. “He’s been helpful with the press,” she replied. “Has given me precise information on any reporter I’ve met, without prescribing what I should tell them. And while he does seem friendly with MacPherson, I know he’s a staunch pacifist – goodness knows how he justifies his position to himself.” She detached one hand for a slow, looping gesture. “In any case, this endeavor will create a lot of headlines, and having him on the team – if possibly not from the beginning – will be useful.” 

“Or someone from his team, maybe,” Myka nodded. “It’d be good to have someone from PR to help smooth things, that’s for sure. I just… let me look into who’s a bit further down the line, okay? As close as he is to Mr. MacPherson, this could go horribly wrong if his pacifism isn’t a strong enough motivation.” Besides, Myka had no idea if the man actually liked Wells enough to be loyal to her over his friendship to MacPherson. He was helpful with the press, that was true – but not just the professional press. In the short time since Wells had taken on the position as CEO, she’d made headlines in the yellow press as well. Her appetites seemed indiscriminate and voracious; Myka had seen photos of the woman with male as well as female ‘conquests’, and it was Nielsen who had to deal with the fallout of that. If Wells knew that her actions were making his job far more complicated than it had ever been with James MacPherson (or rather, that was what Myka assumed), she wasn’t letting that on – and Myka didn’t want to bring it up if she didn’t have to.

Wells nodded pensively. “I’ve been pondering that, too. By all means look into the rest of his department.” She brought her hands together in front of her in not quite a clap, not quite a rub. “Now what I need you to do,” she went on, “is find a pretense to get these two women – I did note that you did not suggest any men, Ms. Bering, and I highly appreciate it – into a room together. Preferably outside of company buildings and company hours. We need to figure out if they are amenable to my ideas, and I need to see if I trust them, too, your talent notwithstanding.”

“That one is actually not that hard,” Myka said with a nod. “First, Ms. Lattimer is Ms. Martin’s former mother in law. Don’t worry,” she added quickly, “they are still on speaking terms. More than that, actually, and that’s my second point: they regularly have lunch together. I’ve joined them a few times. They both love food; most of the time we talk about nothing else than how the cafeteria food compares to where they’ve been recently or where they go regularly, that kind of thing. _They_ could tell you where to find the best sandwich in L.A., for sure.” It had become a running joke among Ms. Wells and her – Myka’s lack of knowledge on the hottest food spots in town and Wells’ lack of anything remotely resembling eating habits. If Myka didn’t schedule lunches for her, the woman wouldn’t eat. Heavens knew how she sustained her ten-hour days. Then again, Myka had no basis whatsoever to point a finger, on eating habits or working hours. Rebecca, her neighbor, her former employer, her _friend_ , had stopped commenting and started glaring wordlessly, and while her glare was not quite as intimidating as Wells’, it hurt more, because it came from a friend. 

Myka shook the thought away. This job was not just rewarding, it was exciting, and apparently about to become even more so.

“You and I will join them on a lunch date, then,” Wells mused, oblivious of Myka’s thoughts. “That seems workable enough.” She gave a decisive nod. “Do it.”

-_-_-

A few days later, the CEO of Wells Industries and her personal assistant met the deputy heads of civilian R&D and compliance for a decidedly non-working lunch. It had been Jane Lattimer who had insisted that if she was to take her boss to the best Swiss restaurant in town, work was not to be on the agenda. There had been a few emails on that topic, a few water-cooler conversations Myka had been sure to have, about how much Ms. Wells had grouched about the request but had finally seen the sense of it, in the name of work-life-balance and appreciation of good food, and now here they were, very nearly the only customers and a be-dirndl-ed server’s center of attention.

After ordering, Myka turned to Jane. “I thought you said this place was the best.” She let her eyes roam meaningfully over the mostly empty tables. 

“Oh, it is,” came the quick reply. “Just wait until you taste that rösti. But it’s a place where people go for dinner, not lunch, that’s why no-one’s here but us and them.” She nodded over to a group of white men in business suits who were talking a peculiarly accented German. 

“Which well suits our purpose,” Wells said. “I don’t want word of this to get anywhere, not even by rumor. We are up against several disadvantages here – the boys’ club, the military, the public if this ends in a loss of jobs-”

“Which it will,” Jane interjected gravely. “Make no mistake of that. Tens of thousands if we’re very lucky, six figures if we’re not.”

Wells nodded. “And that is why I want to figure out what kinds of jobs we will offer in the future, and propose re-training for everyone affected by the company’s turn. There will of course still be those who will deny the chance, and those who will insist on turning it into bad press, but if we do our homework well, they’ll be left with few arguments over which to point fingers.”

“If we set up those re-trainings right,” Amanda said, leaning forward, “we might be able to apply for government subsidies.”

“Definitely not.” Wells shook her head decisively. “We will already have the military at our throats for leaving them in a lurch; I don’t want _them_ to point their fingers at how we’re draining government coffers on top of it, and I don’t want politicians to do so either. We’re going to present to the governments – federal, state, whichever is applicable – that this isn’t going to cost their precious taxpayer’s money and it is creating jobs in…” Wells cast around with a frown.

“Infrastructure,” Myka said immediately. “Civil engineering. Renewable energies.”

Wells turned to her, eyebrows raised. “You’ve been giving this some thought,” she said with a surprised smile. 

Myka nodded. “I think it would fit – there have always been these large figures advancing things in their field. Edison, Vanderbilt, Ford, Gates, Musk – why not Wells?” She’d rather bite off her tongue than saying that it would fit right in with the original H.G. Wells’ agenda of societal change, but that, too, was an aspect she’d been giving some thought. Very, very late at night.

“And this is a field where the government has been withdrawing for decades,” Jane chimed in, nodding along. “There is much that can be done, that should be done, that _needs_ to be done-”

“And that isn’t being done for the simple reason that there’s no profit in it,” Wells said. She paused while the server put their glasses in front of them, then went on, “Wells Industries is still a public company – incorporated, as you Americans call it,” she corrected herself with a small roll of her eyes. “If we go this way, if we turn from weapons manufacture, one of the most profitable and future-proof endeavors, to civil engineering and infrastructure of all things, where even the government isn’t doing anything anymore, profits will tank.”

“And how much does that matter to you?” Myka gave back. 

When Jane and Amanda raised their eyebrows at her audacity, Wells pointed at Myka and smiled at them. “This,” she said, “is exactly the kind of question, the kind of honesty I need. My endeavor is not going to work if you mollycoddle me or only tell me what you think I want to hear.” Turning back to Myka, she went on, “Wells Industries has been run conservatively enough to have sufficient reserves to sustain a handful of years of bad press or slower business. However, as I pointed out, there is hardly a prospect of fatter years to come in infrastructure. Public spending is notoriously low and will in all likelihood stay so.”

“Find a more profitable area, then, and go there, too,” Myka suggested.

Amanda grinned wickedly. “I’ve always thought that Tesla needed competition.”

Wells looked startled for a moment, then her eyes widened in understanding. “Oh, the car manufacturer,” she said. 

Amanda nodded. “Combustion engines in all their applications are a dying industry. They just don’t want to face it yet, don’t want to change as radically as they’d need to. But crude oil is a finite resource and, worse, speeds up climate change. GM, Chrysler, Ford, they’re all closing their eyes to that, and the oil industry is happy to whisper in their ears that that’s perfectly okay.”

“Not just their ears,” Jane said. “The ears of the government and the public too. Tesla’s electric cars are seen as an outlier, a plaything for rich people, nothing to be taken seriously. Tesla hasn’t been turning a profit since they set out, and it’s been almost a decade now. And it isn’t looking as though they’ll turn that around anytime soon.”

“Then maybe competition could help bring that turnaround about for all companies involved,” Amanda maintained. 

“I do like the idea of electric engines over combustion engines,” Wells said with a smile. “I’ll look into it.”

“Water,” Jane added suddenly. 

Wells tilted her head. “Water?”

“It’d be another area where we’d have to tread lightly, but water infrastructure could be another field.” Jane leaned forward across the table. “Countless communities have trouble with their water supply. Old pipes made with lead, polluted grounds, insufficient sewage and water treatment – and then companies like Nestlé who come in with pretty slideshows and peppy consultants and bad, very bad intentions.”

“Surely that’s another example of an endeavor unlikely to turn a profit anytime soon,” Wells gave back. 

“Oh, totally,” Jane nodded immediately. “I’d go a step further and say you’re not going to _want_ to go after profit in that one; that’s Nestlé’s spiel and that’s why they’re loathed by a great many people. But what this _will_ get you is good press. Especially if – don’t take me wrong here – you put an American in charge of it. No disrespect intended, Ms. Wells, but part of why Nestlé in particular has such a bad public image is that it’s not seen as an American company. I know Wells Industries is, of course, but you are not. And it’s no help that the former CEO is English, too.”

Wells sighed. “I understand. I suppose it’s no use pointing out that I have dual citizenship?”

Both Jane and Amanda shook their heads. “Not in this context, no,” Amanda said. “I mean look at that ridiculous Obama birth certificate affair.”

With another sigh, Wells leaned back. As if on cue, the server appeared carrying a tray of dishes. The next five minutes were spent tasting, enjoying, commenting, and eventually sharing. The rösti, Myka thought, was indeed particularly nice – like a large, round, flat, divinely crispy tater tot prepared by a master chef. 

“Ms. Wells, this might be out of left field,” Amanda said finally, putting her fork aside, “but have you given any thought to fusion reactors?”

Wells, who had finished her own dish only moments ago, took some time dabbing her mouth with her napkin. Then she sighed, tossed the napkin onto her plate, and said, “There are two things I want to reply to that. First, yes, I have thought about it, for longer than you’d probably believe me. Second, seeing as we’ve all eaten off each other’s forks by this point, feel free to call me Helena, or H.G. if you like; all of you.”

There was a clink as Jane’s fork landed on her plate. She swallowed down her bite and grimaced. “I wonder what people like MacPherson will make of it – first we all meet for lunch, then we’re on a first-name basis with the new CEO.”

Myka was glad someone else had pointed it out. She didn’t feel too at ease with the idea of ‘Helena’-ing her boss in front of other people. As if she’d read her mind, Jane nodded towards her. “And it’s virtually unheard of, at least at this hierarchy level, for a PA to call her employer by their first name.”

With almost a groan of frustration, Helena leaned back in her chair. “While I understand the dilemma, of course, I…” she looked at each of them in turn, then dropped her eyes to the wadded napkin on her plate. “I came here five weeks ago,” she went on, “I left basically all of my life behind and I haven’t had a conversation that wasn’t work related since I arrived here.” 

“You’re trying to make friends,” Amanda said. “Why didn’t you say so?” She grinned at Helena. “How about we call you H.G. in private and Ms. Wells in public? That way we won’t raise suspicions and you still get to be called by your first name every so often.” Then Amanda looked over at Myka. “You’re the one who’s around her most often, though,” she went on. “Do you think you can make that work?”

Myka tried hard not to look at Ms. Wells – Helena – too closely. The look of hope, of longing almost, in those brown eyes was hard to say no to. “I… think so,” she said finally. 

What she didn’t say, and what she hoped no one had any suspicions of as talk turned to fusion reactors and the prospects and possibilities thereof, was that, despite all of Ms. Wells’ habitual delusions of grandeur, despite her occasional temper tantrums, despite the fact that she was the employer and Myka the PA, Myka was beginning to feel attracted to her, and that was a surefire way to land in trouble.


	3. Chapter 3

“What do you mean, you’re not taking me?”

“Ms. Bering, Afghanistan is a war zone; I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of that.” Helena’s eyes flashed warningly, and Myka took both a step back and a deep breath. 

“And I’m a trained Secret Service agent,” she said stiffly. “I know how to handle myself, I know how to handle conflict situations, and I know I can be an asset to you on your trip.”

“And I’d rather your training should not become a matter of public knowledge,” Helena gave back. “I do have bodyguards; you yourself trust them, you have trusted them before – why not now?”

“Because-” Myka almost shouted, then bit off her words and took a deep breath. “Because Afghanistan is not the Met Gala,” she said in more measured tones, “and it’s not that I don’t trust them to do their jobs; it’s that I don’t trust them, or you,” she added with a pointed look, “to do a PA’s job.” Which wasn’t the full truth, but it was what she’d stick with for now.

“I promise I’ll forward you any request for my time that I’ll get,” Helena said, in an equally measured voice. “You read all of my mail anyway; I’ll simply ask people to put all their requests in writing and you’ll have them.”

Myka snapped her mouth shut and took another steadying breath. Helena was right, and Myka was overstepping – at least as far as their work relationship was concerned. And even though they were just the two of them in Helena’s office, Myka had made sure to keep to work-related business when at work, and friendlier conversations to their infrequent lunches or the occasional museum visit. And even _then_ , she’d have been overstepping. Helena was an adult, able to take care of herself, able (for all of Myka’s frequent grousing) to plan and execute even something as dangerous as this, up to and including ensuring appropriate safety measures. On top of that, she’d be with the American military – they, too, had an interest in keeping her safe. “You’re right,” she said, trying not to sound crabby. “I’ll, um, arrange your flight, then, shall I?”

Helena nodded. As Myka turned to leave, though, Helena caught her elbow. “I will be careful, Myka,” Helena said quietly but emphatically. “I don’t need reminding that Afghanistan is a war zone, either, nor that,” and she lowered her voice even more, “I’m going there with someone who I know doesn’t have my best interests at heart.” 

Myka nodded quickly, and just as quickly stepped away from Helena. Yes, the CEO suite was surveillance-free, but still she didn’t want to risk someone coming in, unexpected, unannounced, whatever, and see them stand this close. And even more than that, she didn’t want Helena to realize that a hand on her elbow and the use of her first name had set Myka’s heart racing – even more than the thought of Helena heading straight into a war zone, a thought that brought back memories of Washington, and shoot-outs, and Daniel Dickinson approaching her with _that look_ on his face. 

So Myka stepped away, and she lowered her head, and she went to her desk to arrange flights and bodyguards and accommodation and catering, for a business trip that had been James MacPherson’s suggestion. Whatever his reasoning was beyond ‘see our most advanced tech in action’, nobody knew, but Myka had her misgivings. 

And then Helena George Wells disappeared. 

There was an attack on the convoy, MacPherson, who had ‘luckily’ made it back to the base, reported later. That was how Myka learned of it – through a goddamn press conference the man held, _on base_ , the very day it happened. He spoke of valiant deeds by escorting soldiers, of every effort made, of rewards and bounties, and all the while Myka was ready to scream at the screen, certain that he was behind the whole thing. It was only when she felt a restraining hand on her arm that she remembered she was in HQ’s largest conference room. 

“Steady,” Amanda Martin whispered. “It’ll be alright.”

Myka huffed out a breath, but did try to relax her shoulders. “Thanks,” she whispered back.

“Why don’t you come around to my place tonight,” Amanda offered, “let’s digest this together, okay? And feel free to bring Rebecca.”

Myka nodded, and Amanda melted back into the crowd gathered around the large screen. When Myka and Rebecca showed up at Amanda’s apartment a few hours later, Myka wasn’t surprised to see Jane waiting in the living room. Jane and Rebecca had hit it off from the very first time they’d met at Myka’s birthday party ten days ago; and Amanda was nothing if not a networker – or matchmaker, as the case might be.

“Abigail is on the case already,” Amanda said with barely any preamble, walking behind Myka with four wineglasses held by their stems in one hand, and a chilled bottle of white wine in her other. 

“That’d be Colonel Cho, right?” Jane asked, patting the seat next to her for Rebecca. Watching the two of them subconsciously scoot close to one another, Myka couldn’t help but wonder if Amanda’s instinct hadn’t been spot on the money. 

“Lieutenant Colonel,” Amanda corrected Jane, and set the glasses down. “But yeah. She’s the Armed Forces liaison to Wells Industries, so she was down there already when it happened, if not actually _on_ that particular trip. Of course she’s not the commanding officer, not even the ranking officer in that area, but she talked her way into the task force created for this, and she’s been telling me as much as she can.” She huffed with a roll of her eyes. “Which isn’t a lot, obviously, since I’m civilian now and also not Artie Nielsen, but I know how to make sense of what she’s giving me.”

Myka sank down on Amanda’s couch, not trusting her knees to hold her up any longer. “Thanks,” she whispered again, just like she had in the conference room.

“Girl, you got it bad,” Amanda said dryly, putting a glass in front of her and pouring out a generous amount of wine. 

“What? No! No, I-”

“No, you what?” Amanda asked back, looking at her expectantly while the glass filled up.

“No, I don’t want that much wine,” Myka said peevishly. Rebecca was _grinning_ at her. Even Jane had her smirk on. 

Amanda rolled her eyes and patted Myka’s knee. “Fine,” she said. “Be that way.” She began to fill the other three glasses. “Don’t think you’re getting out of this though.”

“Can we _please_ talk about Helena being who knows where?”

Amanda dropped into her seat, suddenly serious. “I tried to pin Abigail down on if they’d found anything… definite, after the attack.” She must have seen how queasy that word made Myka, for she went on quickly, “She didn’t say they did, and her wording is the one Armed Forces uses when they’re working on the assumption that the target is still alive because no evidence to the contrary has been found.”

“So either H.G. was blown to bits so thoroughly that there’s no evidence of her at all anymore, or she’s still alive,” Jane said.

Rebecca gasped audibly, then glowered at Jane.

Myka winced as Jane’s words reawakened the twisting feeling in her stomach. She tried to rally, though. Bad enough that Amanda had come this close to calling her out. None of the three women present knew about Sam, not even Rebecca. And Myka didn’t want them to know; she didn’t want that extra layer of eggshells in the conversation; not now and probably not ever. “I know what it means, thank you,” she said acerbically, to deflect and dissemble. 

“That’s right, Ms. Secret Service,” Jane said, sounding completely undisturbed, “and you also know that _everything_ is being done to find her. Not just because she’s the objective, but because every single soldier in the Armed Forces _loves_ her.” 

“True, but if MacPherson is behind this-” Myka broke off when Rebecca gasped again, but it was Amanda who spoke next.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” she said, holding up her hands. “Myka, I know you don’t trust him, and okay, in business terms I can see why, but really? Abduction? Assassination?”

“The man makes my skin crawl,” Myka replied heatedly. “And yes, I totally think that he’s capable of that kind of violence to get what he wants.” From the corner of her eyes, she saw Rebecca sit open-mouthed, digesting what she’d just heard, but Myka couldn’t find it in her to care. She clenched her fists, then unclenched them and ran her hands through her hair – until they snagged on her hair tie. She let out a frustrated groan, tugged it out, and tossed it into the sofa’s corner. “I knew it was a bad idea to let her go on that trip.” Then she grabbed her glass and downed half of its contents in one go.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa I say again,” Amanda said. “First, girlfriend, that’s a twenty-dollar bottle. If you want to chug, I have a box of Trader Joe red somewhere.” She cast Myka a dark look. Then she cocked her head. “Second, ‘ _let her_ go on this trip’? You’re not doing my assumption on the nature of your worry any favors here, darling.” She mimicked Helena’s British accent on the last word, imitating the way Helena addressed any celebrity or celebrity reporter that came her way.

Myka shot her a glare that, by rights, should have singed her pretty blonde hair. “Shut up,” she said darkly and, ostentatiously, drank the rest of her wine. 

“Girls,” Rebecca chided mildly, and, “Focus,” said Jane.

“Well, it’s not like we can do anything from here,” Amanda said, grabbing her own glass and sipping from it, with another pointed look at Myka’s empty glass.

“On the contrary,” Jane countered. “With MacPherson tied down in Afghanistan for the rest of the week, we can at least take advantage of his absence.”

Myka perked up, if only slightly. “And I’ve been meaning to ask Kelly if she has made any progress.” At least it’d take her mind off things.

“Yeah, it’d be unfortunate if that took more than the three months MacPherson has in his contract,” Amanda said, rolling her eyes. “I mean half of that is already over anyway.”

“Amanda, why don’t you try and see if you can look into MacPherson’s expenses of the last few months,” Jane suggested. 

“Spot check as per regulations,” Amanda nodded immediately, pointing a finger gun at her. “A bit on-the-nose perhaps, given the circumstances, but then he’s always so prissy about it when I request his files when he’s actually there, to the point that I’m sure I can just tell Ms. O ‘whatever it takes’ when I ask her.”

“Good point,” Jane agreed. “Berenice isn’t too fond of him anyway.”

“You really are on first name basis with everyone, aren’t you,” Myka asked. She saw Rebecca smile at this – her friend had rallied pretty well, all things considered, and was now listening to these deliberations with dark if disbelieving glee.

“The important people, anyway,” Jane gave back with a smug smile. “CEO PA’s definitely rank among them.” She winked at Myka, then took a sip of the wine, too, and hummed appreciatively. “This is good.”

“Tell _her_ ,” Amanda sniped with another glare at Myka, who noticed that Amanda wasn’t making any attempt at refilling her glass. 

“Alright, alright,” Myka sighed and grabbed the bottle to pour herself a more restrained glass. She took a sip, paying attention this time, and found herself impressed. “Sorry,” she said. “This really _is_ good.”

“Of course it is!” Amanda replied, but she did sound mollified. “And I’m sorry for making fun of you. It’s gotta be hard not to know-”

“Can we-” Myka interrupted her, then broke off and shook her head, taking another mouthful of wine to cover how high-pitched her voice had been. “Can we please not?” She had barely come to terms herself with how hard this was hitting her; she really didn’t want to face sympathy or ribbing, however gentle it might be. Any thought of any parallel to Sam’s death had been buried deep, and that’s where it would stay, right alongside any mentions of what Myka might or might not feel for her abducted boss. 

“Of course,” Rebecca said immediately, shooting Amanda a warning glance. “Let’s keep this to what we can do to discover what your MacPherson is up to, shall we?”

-_-_-

It was a week until they had any substantive news from Afghanistan, a week in which Myka, try though she might, found her nerves fraying around the edges with every hour that passed. 

“Kidnapped!” she exclaimed when MacPherson, back in the US after ‘doing all he could on the spot’, gave the board and the department heads the news. She wasn’t even sure why she was in the room with all of them; if it was a result of sloppy ‘copy all’ invitation writing or if one of the people present had anything to do with it. Hugo Miller had winked at her when he’d arrived, but that might have just been him being Hugo Miller.

“I’m afraid so, dear Miss Bering,” MacPherson said in his most unctuous tones. “We have received a video from a terrorist group that clearly shows her in their grasp. They claim Wells Industries is selling weapons to more than just our allies, which is clearly nonsense, and are threatening to kill her if we don’t prove that we’ve stopped.”

“How can we do that?!” Erik Kluger, head of military R&D spluttered. “How the hell can we give them proof of having stopped doing something that we’re not doing in the first place?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” MacPherson replied, spreading his arms. “I’ve already issued a statement saying as much, of course, but my hopes that they’ll accept that are, frankly, minimal. The Armed Forces in the area are furiously searching for these terrorists’ hideout, hoping to extract Miss Wells from their clutches. Until then, I’m afraid our hands are tied.” He nodded around the table. “I’ll forward the official initial statement to each of you, ladies and gentlemen; please stick to its wording in any correspondence from now on. Mister Nielsen,” he inclined his head towards the short, squat man sitting three seats down from him, “is already now composing a more elaborate statement for release to the press; anything issued to the press by anyone else before he’s finished will be considered a breach of trust, with all the consequences thereof.” Again, he cast a look around the table, then put his hands onto it and rose from his chair. “That will be all.”

As they all filed out, Hugo Miller pressed past Myka, jostling into her hip. “Oh, pardon me,” he said in his raspy baritone, giving her an amiable smile. 

“Of course,” Myka said, and off he was – for a man his age, he moved incredibly quickly. Myka shook her head and made her way to her office. 

When she put her hand in her pocket to take out her key fob, her fingers encountered a folded piece of paper – no doubt planted there by Miller just now, but why? What was it? Myka fought down the impulse to take out the paper right there and then; the corridors _were_ under surveillance, she knew. Fumbling a little with her keys to cover for her moment of hesitation, she opened her door, went in, assembled a stack of files, and went to the CEO suite. Only after letting herself in _there_ and closing the door firmly did she take the paper out and unfolding it. 

‘It’ll be alright,’ she read, in Jane’s neat handwriting. 

Myka stared at the message. Jane couldn’t have known what MacPherson had to say. Had she written this, and asked Miller to deliver it, on a hunch? Why though?

‘It’ll be alright.’

Maybe Jane had simply wanted Myka to have something reassuring in case MacPherson’s news was bad news. Myka’s lower lip trembled for a moment, and her eyes filled. She took a deep breath and blinked the tears away. She carefully folded the paper again and put it back into her pocket, and then she returned to her office, got behind her desk, and went on with her work.


	4. Chapter 4

“She’s running a bit late,” Pete Lattimer said, rocking on his heels. “Not like her, usually.” He put his hands into his pockets and turned back to the tarmac, watching heat distortion rise under the afternoon sun.

He was Helena’s driver, and Myka had liked him from the first time she’d met him. She’d never encountered someone whose whole demeanor shouted ‘trustworthy’ this much – despite the fact that when it came to food (and he’d been eating when she met him), his behavior was that of a completely uninhibited five-year-old. But when the time came to be professional, he was, and Myka appreciated that. “No, not really,” she said in reply to his comment, wishing she sounded half as calm as he did. He was most definitely not a worrier. She, most definitely, was. 

Ms. Wells’ private jet was supposed to have landed three minutes ago – with her on board. The briefing had been… brief. MacPherson had announced, first on a company-wide channel and then on every major news outlet, that Ms. Wells had been found alive after having escaped her captors on her own, that she was in better health than anyone had expected, and that she’d be ‘coming home as fast as humanly possible.’ 

That had been twenty-eight hours ago. 

Rationally, Myka knew that even with a private jet and clearance straight from the Pentagon, getting out of Afghanistan wasn’t easy. 

Rationally, she knew that a private plane, even one as large as Helena’s, would have to refuel on such a trip.

Rationally, she knew she should have slept.

How do you sleep, though, when behind your closed eyes memories of your dead partner-slash-significant-other and your current boss-slash-crush kept blurring into each other, nauseating you with dread?

She folded her hands behind her back to stop them from shaking. ‘Better health than expected’ might mean anything; there was an ambulance standing by – standard USAF procedure, just like the two military police vehicles waiting next to it. Myka knew all that; her Secret Service training had told her so and Amanda had confirmed it via text message. But deep down in her bones, Myka couldn’t help but wonder how she’d stop herself from running up the plane’s stairs as soon as they descended to make sure, in person, about Helena’s health. 

“Been in the service yourself?” Pete remarked, not taking his eyes off the still-empty tarmac. 

Myka blinked. “How did you know?”

“It’s a very distinct stance.” He shifted his weight briefly, and his elbow nudged Myka’s. From the corner of her eye – because her gaze, too, was glued to the runway – she saw his lips crinkle in a small grin. 

“Secret Service,” she said, trying to sound light. 

“I know,” he replied. He seemed to see her perplexed expression, because he went on, “Me too. When I left, though, it wasn’t like you, all dramatic and tragic and stuff. I just had a problem with the bottle.” His smile became self-deprecating. “Protective detail to personal driver, and that only because my mom put in a good word.” Then he glanced over at Myka, and blinked. The smile slid off his face. “Aw man,” he said. “Hey, I’m sorry I brought this up.”

Myka shook her head wordlessly, trying to get her features back under control. She _had_ wondered, she reminded herself, how her leaving had looked to the rest of the Service, what with her partner being shot dead on duty and then her being investigated – even if that was standard procedure. Now she knew. She swallowed. “It’s okay.” She tried to find a comment to defuse the situation, something about his mom, maybe – which she’d known, because she always knew her details, but she hadn’t known the whys, only the whats – but try as she might, she couldn’t come up with one.

Pete shook his head. “Sure,” he said, though his eyes told her he was indulging her, letting it go. Before she could take breath to tell him what she thought of that, he went on, “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, that she picked former Secret Service agents for jobs like ours?”

Myka snorted softly, welcoming the change of topic. “Not after what happened on this trip.”

“You’d have a point,” Pete huffed, “ _if_ she had taken either of us with her.” Then his chin jutted upwards to a speck of silver in the sky. “There she is.” 

Myka, too, saw the plane approaching. She tried valiantly to suppress a second snort when she realized that her heart was speeding up. 

Once she’d run up those stairs, would she lay into Helena or hug her?

Or would that ‘better health than expected’ preclude either?

The MPs had seen the plane now, too – they were straightening up and moving closer to the plane’s intended parking spot. The EMTs, too, were looking more alert. They already had a head start, as it were – Myka and Pete had opted to wait inside the air-conditioned gate instead of out on the tarmac; it was a typical May Los Angeles day, after all. Still, Myka was determined.

“I wonder who’ll be first into the plane, seeing that,” Pete said from the corner of his mouth. 

Myka almost giggled – nerves, she told herself. He hadn’t read her mind, surely. Then she realized the intention behind his words, the unspoken encouragement to assert herself, and straightened. “Me,” she said quietly. 

“Well, then.” There was a definite note of approval in Pete’s voice. “Up and at ‘em.”

It took some negotiating – Myka would have been prepared to let the EMTs go first, but certainly not the MPs unless they had a warrant, which they didn’t – but, in the end, Myka _was_ the first up the stairs as the plane’s door opened. Pete was right behind her. Even his usually so carefree demeanor showed some signs of nerves now.

The plane’s flight attendant greeted them with a smile. “Ms. Bering, Mr. Lattimer. Ms. Wells is expecting you.”

Myka ignored him, pushing by him and into the plane the moment she realized that Helena wasn’t at the door. 

Helena couldn’t have sat more regally in her leather seat if she’d been the Queen of England herself, but Myka noticed the signs of fatigue and strain in her face and posture, and the scratches and bruises on her face and hands. Any words of reprimand left her tongue, and she stood speechless for a moment. 

Helena stood slowly, putting one hand on the seat’s backrest for support. “No ‘I told you so’s, then?” she quipped, and even her voice sounded tired. 

With a strangled sound, Myka rushed forwards to hug her. 

Helena’s shoulders seemed thinner and more angular than Myka would have expected. That and Helena’s small protesting exclamation made Myka let go again immediately. “I’m sorry!” she exclaimed, taking a small step back. “Are you okay?”

A look crossed Helena’s face that Myka couldn’t fathom. Sorrow? Longing? Or just pain? “As well as can be,” Helena replied with a lopsided, tired smile. “I shall need you and Mister Lattimer to take me home as quickly as possible,” she added.

“Of course,” Myka said immediately. 

Pete echoed her, and that made Myka realize that he’d followed her in. She silently reprimanded herself – in a confined space like this, she should have sensed his presence behind her; she was damn well trained to. Her worry was impeding her effectiveness, and that just wouldn’t do.

That impediment became even more obvious when, upon entering the blessedly cool terminal, a couple dozen reporters rushed them, almost stampeding over a hand-wringing Arthur Nielsen.

The four MPs quickly cordoned them off, but Myka should have seen that coming; should have prevented it. 

Helena, though, gave no indication of being bothered by the crowd. If anything, her posture was more energetic than before, and she stepped towards the thickest cluster of microphones immediately. 

“Thank you for your warm welcome,” she purred into them, to a few laughs from the more self-aware reporters. “First, let me assure you – any reports of my death were, _clearly_ , an exaggeration.” This got a few more laughs. 

Myka watched this from behind, trying very hard not to shake her head. She knew that Helena thrived on the press’ attention; she also knew that Helena was able to play them masterfully. That had always been the case. Helena flirted with everyone and everything, microphones, cameras and reporters alike. And the press, from business journalists to tabloid reporters, lapped it up. It drove Artie up the walls about as often as it made his job easier instead of harder. 

Shutters clicked, cameras rolled, people jostled each other for best position as Helena answered questions about what had happened with answers that didn’t tell anyone anything at all beyond what was already known. Then she raised her hands, and the crowd fell silent. “There’s one thing I have to tell you,” she began, and Myka’s heartrate shot skywards. Surely- “No, two,” Helena corrected herself with a grin that was almost manic. She began to unbutton her suit jacket, and Myka started to try and think of a way to stop this that didn’t include tackling her boss to the floor. Behind Helena, she saw Artie move towards the woman with an expression that told her he was thinking along the same lines. Then the assembled reporters gasped, pulling Myka’s attention back to them, and _then_ Helena turned around to Myka and Pete and gestured towards her chest with a proud smile. 

There was a bright light shining from the center of her sternum, right atop her fourth blouse button. Right between- 

Before Myka could take that thought further, Helena turned back to the crowd. “This,” she said, while shutters clicked furiously, “is a fully functional minimized arc reactor. Fusion power, ladies and gentlemen – a Wells Industries invention, perfected by me. Soon this will power cars, homes, even planes. Scaled up, it will power whole cities, cleanly and safely.” She buttoned up her shirt again, but not before making sure everyone who wanted their shot got it. “Secondly,” she went on, “in order to concentrate on furthering this technology and others in its vein, Wells Industries will no longer develop, produce, or sell any weapons anywhere to anyone, nor adjacent technology. If my recent adventure has taught me anything, it is that there is no future in that.”

In the silence following her words, Myka’s pulse thundered in her ears. 

She’d done it. She’d said it. The cat was out of the bag.

And they hadn’t talked about it beforehand. This would blindside everyone, MacPherson of course, but Jane and Amanda too. Artie looked like he was on the brink of an aneurism, mutely opening and shutting his mouth as he stared at his boss. 

Shrugging back into her jacket, Helena said, “That will be all. Thank you.” Then she took a step back, turned, and on cue the MPs took over crowd control again – which they had to, because that last statement had been a bombshell and now everyone was clamoring.

Helena threw a meaningful look at Pete and Myka, and Pete immediately started heading to where he’d parked the car. Myka followed them. She kept looking around even if she didn’t know exactly what for – more reporters? More surprises? 

She saw the MPs trying to shepherd the reporters while at the same time not losing sight of Helena, their target. “Pete,” she called out, and nodded to the tangle behind them when he half-turned. “I’m pretty sure they’re under orders to escort us.”

“Bad luck for them,” Helena replied. “I have no intention to let them.”

“You don’t _let-_ ” Myka began, but Helena was speeding up and she had to almost run to keep up. “You don’t let the military police not escort you, Hel- Ms. Wells.”

“Oh, I’m positive they don’t have a warrant, Ms. Bering, otherwise they’d have been in my plane with you, before you even,” Helena gave back over her shoulder. “I’m a free citizen, not indicted of anything; I can go wherever I please.” 

They were at the car now; Pete held open the back door for Helena to slip in, then released it to Myka with a nod and walked towards the driver’s door.

“Ms. Bering!” came a shout from behind her.

She turned back towards the building. A slender, fair-skinned man of medium age was jogging towards her, badge held up. 

“Name’s Jinks,” he panted when he reached her. “Steve Jinks, Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.”

Myka took his badge and scrutinized it. She’d never heard of that agency before, but there was the president’s seal, and that meant she could give this presumable agent at least a moment. “Yes?” she said brusquely. Helena _had_ said ‘home, as quickly as possible’. 

He fumbled in his inside pocket and took out a calling card. “I realize this isn’t a good moment, but once things have settled a bit, I’d like to meet Ms. Wells to talk about what she just revealed.” 

Myka took the card from him. “It’s probably a good idea if you remind me in couple of days, Agent Jinks,” she said. 

He nodded. “I will.” He pointed over his shoulders to Artie and the MPs still wrestling – in one case literally – with the reporters. “In the meantime, I’ll take care of that for you, okay?” he said. “Gesture of goodwill.”

“Sure,” she said, wondering if his badge even carried that much authority when she’d never even heard of his agency, and what his gesture would cost her down the road.

“Ms. _Bering_ ,” a peevish voice came from inside the car.

Myka tilted her head apologetically at Agent Steve Jinks. “Gotta cut this short, agent. Thanks.” She nodded at him, and the moment he turned, she got in with Helena and closed the door. She half heard an MP’s frustrated shout, but then the engine sprung to life and the car took off. “Sorry,” she told Helena, but Helena ignored her.

“As fast as you can, please, Mr. Lattimer.”

“You got it, boss.” The car’s engine revved, and Myka felt herself being pressed into the seat.

“Are you alright?” She turned to Helena, because the voice in which Helena had uttered her request to Pete had been shaking. 

_Helena_ was shaking. “Just… splendid,” she pressed out between spasms. 

“Goddamnit, Helena, this isn’t funny!” Myka grabbed Helena’s shoulders, felt them seize under her fingers, saw Helena’s eyes flutter shut. “Is it this… thing you got in there?” Its light was steady, but Helena didn’t answer, and Myka’s worry spiked. “Pete,” she shouted, “take us to the nearest hospital, now!”

“No!” Helena’s eyes slammed open. “Mr. Lattimer, you know what to do. Standard protocol. I trust you to stick to it.”

“I got you, boss,” Pete replied, calm as you please. 

Myka could have shaken him. Instead, she turned back to Helena. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” But Helena had lost consciousness. “Pete, tell me you’re going to a hospital!”

“Get her into recovery position,” Pete said tersely, stepping on the gas even more. “This isn’t unusual – well, except for that reactor thing, I haven’t seen _that_ before. But I know what to do. In fact, I have specific instructions for what to do. Standard protocol; you heard her. And I have a vibe about this that tells me she’s right.” He met Myka’s eyes in the rear view mirror and shrugged away her fury. “Sorry; can’t explain right now, but she’s got everything she needs where we’re going. Just watch over her till we’re there, okay? It’s not far; ten minutes, fifteen tops.”

Myka stared at him for a moment, then let out a frustrated breath and turned back to the unconscious woman next to her. “Recovery,” she muttered, and sank off the seat – fortunately, the car was large enough for her to kneel on the floor in front of the bench. She quickly arranged Helena’s limbs into the required positions, then checked her pulse and breath. Both were uneven, but present. The light of the… arc reactor, whatever that was, was still steady. Should it be pulsing? Like a heartbeat maybe? Wouldn’t that make more sense? What was it for, anyway; why was it there?

Myka shook her head. She wouldn’t get any answers until Helena woke up again, and she really, really hoped that ‘standard protocol’, whatever the hell _that_ was, was the right call. She told herself that if she put her hand on Helena’s wrists just so, she’d be able to monitor her breath _and_ pulse until they arrived, and be closer to help in case Pete needed to brake unexpectedly. It wasn’t at all for reasons of reassuring herself that Helena really was back, that she really was alive, by touching her warm skin, by feeling her breath tickle the back of her fingers. 

It wasn’t at all because she’d been unable to do anything like that for Sam, back then.

She mentally cursed herself for even thinking of him – she’d left the Secret Service, left D.C., left the fricking _East Coast_ to no longer think of him, think of that day. She’d sworn to herself she’d never be in this position again, and yet here she was, in a car that was going well over the speed limit, whisking an unconscious person towards help. Not that she’d actually been in the ambulance with Sam, but still. She’d thought life as Helena G. Wells’ personal assistant would contain nothing more worrisome than bringing her boss coffee when she really wanted tea, or an appointment gone wrong. Phones being thrown at walls, perhaps. Not kidnappings and worries if someone was even still alive, or hell-bent not to get the medical attention she really needed, or putting a fricking _fusion_ _reactor_ in her chest. They had joked about the stakes of the job during the interview, for crying out loud!

Myka scoffed softly to herself. This was all Pete’s fault, for bringing up how she’d left the Secret Service earlier.

Then her gaze fell out of the window. She knew _that_ highway. “Are we going to Malibu?” she asked, realizing as she did so that she had no idea where Helena actually lived. 

“Direction of, anyway,” Pete replied. “Turning off in a bit.”

“But… there isn’t an exit here,” Myka said. This was her commute home; she _knew_ this stretch of road. Hell, it was famous – the one stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway to run through a tunnel instead of along the actual coast. The only thing even remotely resembling an exit here was- “Don’t tell me we’re taking-”

The car abruptly left the road, taking a sharp right turn, then swerving until it ran parallel to the highway. 

“The old tunnel road? Yep,” Pete nodded.

“But I thought that was abandoned. Closed. Off-limits.” The old tunnel had been built at the turn of the century – 19th to 20th, not the more recent one. It had been replaced in the early nineties, after complaints that it’d gotten too small had reached a level that even the most obstinate government officials had no longer been able to ignore. Myka remembered the nation-wide press the new tunnel had gotten due to the ‘only tunnel on the PCH’ part. It’d been vaguely interesting to a Colorado teenager who dreamed of driving alongside the ocean for hours. Even back then she’d wondered why there had to be a tunnel when all the rest of the highway was right next to the waves.

Then the penny dropped. 

“She lives between the mountains,” she whispered. 

There was a patch of prime real estate that the PCH passed by by way of the tunnel. Everyone knew that that was because someone had bought it, back when you could buy land around Los Angeles by the square mile, and that that someone had built a tunnel with their own money so that any road leading north from the city wouldn’t come between their property and the sea. ‘Between the mountains’ was the common local reference to said property, because it sat between three foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains that formed a perfect W-shape. All anyone knew was that it was private property – including two miles of prime pristine beach, much to everyone’s chagrin. 

“Sure does,” Pete confirmed. 

Myka watched him drive past the off-limits sign and enter the old tunnel. She’d expected loose stones, growths of moss, darkness – but the old tunnel was well-kept, every brick in order, every lamp working. “Not really what ‘abandoned’ suggests,” she remarked.

Pete grinned and took a remote from a pocket of his dashboard. “You haven’t seen half of it,” he said and pushed a button. A quarter-mile ahead of the car, a portion of the left tunnel wall swung inwards. 

Myka gaped. 

“To the Batcave!” Pete intoned as he drove the car into the opening. He met Myka’s eyes in the rear view mirror and grinned again. “Man, I’ve always wanted to show this off to someone. I hope you’re duly impressed.”

“No kidding,” Myka muttered softly. Then she remembered her charge and, chastising herself, checked Helena’s vital signs. Still present, still shallow, but less erratic than they had been. And the reactor was still glowing calmly. “Are we almost there, then?”

Pete nodded and pressed another button on his remote. Something that looked for all intents and purposes like a floodgate across the access road swung open to admit them. Myka could have sworn it was a foot thick as they drove by. 

“Is this the only way to get in?” she asked. “Wouldn’t that be awkward for, I don’t know, getting groceries? Taking out the trash?”

Pete’s expression sobered. “I’ll let the boss answer such questions, okay? I have no idea what I’m allowed to tell you.”

Myka shook her head. “Jesus Christ,” she muttered. “You weren’t that far off with calling this the Batcave, were you?”

“As far as eccentric billionaire goes, no. Don’t know about the superhero part.” Pete pushed a third button, which opened a garage door that would have looked plain, had it not been one in a row of about a dozen. “I mean that thing in her chest does look a bit cyborg, you gotta admit.”

Myka ignored that last comment – she really didn’t want to deal with that right now – and asked instead, “I’m guessing we’re under the house?”

Pete nodded. “And before you ask – I couldn’t tell you how big these caves are; I don’t know myself.”

Again, Myka swore under her breath. 

“Okay,” Pete said as he parked the car. “Let’s get her out and up.”


	5. Chapter 5

“Ms. Bering!” 

Myka huffed an exasperated sigh. She was on her way to lunch; a lunch, moreover, that she intended to be free of work, an actual break. But here came Arthur Nielsen and probably yet another host of questions and problems that she’d somehow have to deal with. She pasted a smile onto her face and turned. “Yes?”

Artie paused for a moment to catch his breath. “Why do you all have to be so tall?” he muttered. “First James, then Ms. Wells, now you-”

Myka Bering, CEO of Wells Industries. Myka still didn’t know how or why exactly that had happened, but two days ago, Kelly had called Myka into her office and pressed a contract into her hands; signed by a hand that Myka recognized right away. And now she and Artie, and the rest of the company, had to deal with it somehow.

“Anyway,” Artie was going on, “here’s a committee hearing invitation that has your name on it.” He thrust a printout into her hands. “Have you found a replacement PA yet? Someone’s gonna have to book you a flight to Washington.”

Myka stared at the paper. “D.C?!” she asked.

“Yes, Washington goddamn D.C.,” Artie barked, “because that is where the government sits, as you no doubt will remember.”

“This is a Senate committee,” Myka said weakly, letting the invite sink and staring at Artie.

“Of course it is,” he said, dialing back his exasperation a little in reaction to whatever he read in her eyes. “What else would it be? Wells Industries is the world’s largest purveyor of weapons; the US government is our largest client. What did you think- what did _she_ think would happen?” He shook his head impatiently. “Disappearing into thin air, then dropping this whole mess in your lap. I guess we all have to take it on good faith that her signature on your contract is real.”

Myka glared at him. Confused she might be, in over her head she might be too; but she’d be damned if she let someone as high in the hierarchy, as important to the company as its head of PR, cast doubt on the legitimacy of her position. “You know her signature as well as I do,” she said sharply. “Yes, her behavior since Afghanistan has been… eccentric, but the decision is watertight.” And a good thing, too, not just because of Artie Nielsen, but far more because of James MacPherson.

Myka certainly had expected some significant-pause-eccentricity, but not to the degree it manifested in Helena’s behavior over the past two weeks, since her return from Afghanistan. Of course being abducted would traumatize you. Being abducted in a war zone far from home, even more so. Having shrapnel in your chest, and having to build a… a souped-up electro-magnet to keep that shrapnel from killing you, still more. Being forced at gunpoint to build a weapon, and building, instead, and in defiance of daily death threats, a crude armored suit _and_ a fully functional, never-before-seen fusion reactor to put in your chest to replace said electro-magnet and power said suit? Myka couldn’t even begin to imagine.

And yeah, everyone had their own ways of dealing with trauma, but-

First, Helena had no longer come to work. Which was acceptable, considering everything that had happened, and she did sign everything Myka brought to her, if grudgingly. But if Myka didn’t drive to Rainbow Cove, as she’d learned Helena called it, no signatures would happen, nor any decisions on business matters, as if she didn’t care what happened to the company. 

Oh, and that near heart attack in the car?

‘Oh, that was just the arc reactor acting up, darling. I need to build a better model; replace this one as soon as possible.’

Myka had heard of eccentric tinkerers, but had never ever thought she’d encounter one. And now Helena George Wells was surpassing all of them, easily.

Then, the decision to make Myka CEO. Single-handledly, too, without consulting anyone. Which was within Helena’s rights as CEO and majority shareholder, certainly, but it came at a significant-pause- _inopportune_ moment, to put it mildly.

Through it all, MacPherson kept quiet, and Myka envisioned him leaning back like the fat cat he was, delighted to see the mice scramble before he pounced. Jane and Amanda were doing all they could; Artie did, too, but in truth, everyone could have had thirty-six hour days and it wouldn’t have been enough time. To be called to Washington was only the icing on the cake.

“Still nothing from her?” Artie asked under his breath.

Myka hesitated, then shook her head. She did trust him – despite his grumblings and growlings, his heart was in the right place and his work ethic was beyond impeccable. She needed him, and he needed to know certain things to do his job well. Myka knew there were – Myka had _seen_ – opinion pieces that questioned Helena Wells’ decisions, leadership, legitimacy; they’d promulgated tenfold after her post-Afghanistan announcement and, now, the change at the top of Wells Industries. No doubt Artie had to field exponentially more interview requests and similar, on a daily basis. He needed to know at least the basics, and if any of those made it to MacPherson – well, it was nothing MacPherson couldn’t infer from other sources anyway.

“No,” Myka added with a sigh. 

Artie shook his head brusquely and muttered an expletive under his breath. Then he snapped his fingers. “Oh,” he said, “there’s also…” He took a rolled-up newspaper from his back pocket, unrolled it, and held it under her nose. “This. I know it’s only a tabloid, I know _you_ know it’s only a tabloid, but if that is her, or in any way linked to her, or us, we’ll be in trouble.”

It was a blurry picture of… Myka snatched up the paper and looked more closely. “What is that, a person with a jet pack?”

“Does that look like a jet pack to you?” Artie barked back, then immediately went on, “No, no, no, look, _look_.” He snatched the paper from her, leafed through its pages, opened it to a different page, thrust it back at her. “See that?”

What Myka saw were more photos, in different states of blurriness and detail, obviously from multiple different cameras and vantage points. And at least two of them showed something that made her heart sink. She looked at Artie, and saw him nod at what he could read from her face. 

“Exactly,” he said. “That looks way too much like her…” he gestured vaguely as he sought for the right words, “suit… thing. The reactor in _her_ chest? And that glowing thing in that… _thing’s_ chest? That’s not a coincidence. You’ve seen the pictures of the armored suit – same place, _exact, same, place._ ” He tapped his finger on one of the photos in emphasis. “You also know those photos were and still are classified. So if this isn’t her, it’s someone either working from her plans, however he got them, or trying to make it seem that way, and that’s just as bad. So when you see her, ask her, _beg_ her to tell you it’s not her. Because this-” he stabbed his finger at the newspaper again, “is vigilantism. And that’s not something a CEO, sorry – former CEO,” he corrected himself as Myka shot him a warning glare, “of Wells Industries should be in any way, shape or form connected to.”

“I’ll see what I can find out,” Myka said tersely. “Can I have that? Thanks.” And she walked away from him, newspaper in hand.

Nobody knew what exactly it was that Helena did, in her ‘secret lair’, as Pete called it – not Pete himself, who whiled away his days working out and playing video games, nor Leena, Helena’s private personal assistant – and certified nurse, as Myka had learned the day Helena came home and had requested to be taken to Rainbow Cove instead of a hospital. All that Pete and Leena could tell Myka, when she asked, was that there was a large part of the underground portion of the building that they weren’t allowed in, and that that was where Helena disappeared to, often for twenty hours or more at a time. 

It _was possible_ that this was Helena, Myka thought grouchily, sitting at her desk and staring at the blurry photos. Technically possible. Not many pictures showed features that allowed her to estimate the suit’s height, but the design? Pure Wells. This armored suit, this _flying_ armored suit, Myka corrected herself, because two of the pictures clearly showed as much, did look like someone had taken that first, crude specimen that Helena had built, and had given it a massive overhaul, the newest materials, and all the hallmarks of Wells Industries design, right down to the silver-and-green color scheme. 

Sure, okay, people could mimic looks and a color scheme easily, especially one as well-known as the Wells Industries’ one. 

But Helena had been locked away behind that door and nobody, _nobody_ knew what she was doing. 

But _vigilantism?_

The article listed three separate occurrences of “Iron Woman” being seen to stop a crime: a bank robbery in Santa Monica, an armed burglary in La Habra, and another bank robbery all the way down in Irvine. In all cases, “Iron Woman” – Myka rolled her eyes at the ridiculously uninspired moniker – had inserted herself between the perpetrators and their victims and/or targets. Any bullets fired had bounced off her suit, and then she’d knocked out the perps and left them for the police to tidy up. 

Myka couldn’t really see Helena doing anything like that, but then, who knew? Who the _hell_ knew what Helena was doing these days?

The very first time Myka had come into Rainbow Cove with a stack of contracts and notes to sign, back when she’d still been Helena’s PA, Helena had been in her secret lair, too. Leena had shown Myka to the intercom with a helpless shrug and a sigh of ‘in case _you_ want to try.’ 

Helena hadn’t reacted to the comm call. Myka had asked Leena to show her the door to wherever Helena was, and proceeded to knock on it, first with her knuckles, then with her fist, and then with a screwdriver from that happened to be lying around in the ante-room. When _that_ hadn’t yielded any results, she’d started looking for something even heavier, but then the door had swung open and a very peevish Helena had held out her hand for the paperwork Myka had brought. 

Leena had pushed a mug of soup into her employer’s fingers instead. Myka had no idea how the other woman had managed to sneak up and get past her, but she didn’t protest too loudly – Helena looked gaunt, skin white as milk with dark oil stains smudged here and there, cheekbones and collarbones standing out so sharply that Myka was half afraid they’d cut through Helena’s skin there and then. 

It became a ritual after that first day – Myka would knock, Helena would come out, get fed, make decisions, write memos, sign paperwork, grouch about it all, then go back to whatever she was doing. Three days in, Leena had given Myka a transmitter to open the gates on her own instead of waiting for her car to be buzzed in, telling her ‘she wants you to have this so that she doesn’t have to stop what she’s doing to let you in’ with a little apologetic shrug. Helena had probably come up with the idea to make Myka CEO purely in order to stop her coming to Rainbow Cove at all, Myka thought darkly as she put the newspaper aside and stared, instead, at the invitation to a freaking _senate committee_ in her hands.

In all that time, Helena had barely said a word, had barely even acknowledged Myka. Gone was the acerbic wit, the challenge to keep up with that sharp intellect, the banter and discourse that had been such a large reason why Myka had come to care for Helena so much. 

Vigilantism? 

Everyone handled trauma in their own way, Myka repeated to herself. And yes, being abducted, and then not found by the authorities, but fighting your own way out might bring a person to a vigilante-adjacent mindset; Helena wouldn’t be the first – Myka’s Secret Service training told her that. 

Myka honestly couldn’t put it past Helena at this point. She wished she could, but…

Myka didn’t want a garage clicker. She wanted the job of CEO even less. 

She wanted Helena back. 

She just needed to figure out how.


	6. Chapter 6

“Two hours,” Myka insisted. “Food, and a conversation that is not about work. A walk along the beach if the weather is nice, like today. Two hours, Helena. That’s really not too much to ask.”

“One,” Helena said through gritted teeth. 

One would already be a success – up until now, Myka had barely gotten twenty minutes with her former boss, five of which Helena usually spent in a heated argument with Leena over whichever food Leena had set in front of her that day. 

Nevertheless, that wasn’t how you led successful negotiations. 

“Ninety minutes,” Myka shot back. “You do know it’s good to step away from what you’re doing, take a moment, get a fresh perspective.”

“I know that very well, thank you,” Helena grumbled. She spat out a disgruntled scoff. Then she looked behind herself. “Fine. Let me just-”

“Unless something is burning back there,” Myka said firmly and pulled Helena through the door and into the hallway, “no.”

She dragged Helena along the corridor, drawing a string of spluttered protests behind them until they were in the actual dining room.

The house – if you could call it that; it was huge, a mansion, really – was beautiful. Large, airy, Italianate of the lightest touch, it straddled the very tip of the hill that formed the middle peak of Rainbow Cove’s W shape. A loggia wrapped around all three sides exposed to the elements, creating both protection from the relentless battery of ocean and rain, and coolness inside that rivaled anything air-conditioned. Not one, but two cupolaed towers, symmetrically placed at the front corners of the building, offered breathtaking views devoid of any human presence except for the pier that extended into the sea at the beach, from which a series of white wooden walkways and staircases rose to connect to the house. 

The dining room was located at the southwest corner of the building, the better to catch any sunset that presented itself behind the – from here – aptly named Sunset Beach. The sun was nowhere near setting yet, though, and wouldn’t start dropping towards the horizon for another hour. Still, the shadows were lengthening under the loggia’s eaves, and creeping into the room where Myka and Helena shared a look at the ocean through the windows.

“I suppose we could talk about how things are shaping up for you,” Helena suggested, but her tone said quite clearly what she thought of the idea. 

Myka shook her head. “They’re calming down a little,” she said. Not that she’d had much help from Helena, a somewhat bitter part of her added, but – a more conscientious part of her pointed out – this way, no one could accuse her of being a figurehead who merely carried out what Helena decreed. “But,” Myka stopped looking at the beach and turned to face Helena, “I really think we should be talking about something completely unrelated to work. I don’t know what it is you’re doing back there-” and when Helena started to protest, Myka raised her hands and quickly added, “and I’m not asking. But you seem… driven, to put it mildly.” ‘Obsessed’ was the word she didn’t use, but it seemed that Helena could hear it anyway.

“And you would draw me out of that, take my mind off things, is that what you’re suggesting?” Helena’s voice was acerbic and she’d turned back to watch the endless waves, but there was something in her stance – Myka wasn’t sure if it was wishful thinking on her part or truly some kind of longing on Helena’s part, but she willed it to be there. 

She hadn’t forgotten yet the Helena who had wanted friends, who had wanted someone in her corner. How could she, when every time she tried to square ‘Helena George Wells, former CEO of Wells Industries’ with ‘flying-armor-suit vigilante’, ‘lost and lonely Helena’ popped up in her mind? In the end, that was why she’d chosen to take this approach – get through to Helena first, somehow. Make sure she was okay. Find out if she needed trauma counseling or anything like that. Then, possibly, find out if she’d turned to vigilantism for some reason.

“Pretty much, yeah,” Myka said lightly in reply to Helena’s question. “But for my sake, too. I need to take _my_ mind off things as well, you know. Mental hygiene. All work and no fun – you know the line.”

Helena nodded. “What, then, shall we talk about?”

Myka had an answer ready – and it hadn’t taken her long at all to come up with it. “Books,” she said immediately. “You asked me once what my favorite authors were. And we’ve spoken a bit about the older ones since then; your namesake, Jules Verne. I’ve been reading more recent books lately, and I’d like to talk with you about them.”

“Where on Earth do you find time to read books?” And now the longing was there, naked, plain and unadorned in Helena’s voice, in Helena’s face that she’d turned to Myka.

“Before bed,” Myka replied with a half-shrug. “Always have. Taught me good time management early on,” she added with a small smile. Then it turned slightly self-deprecating when she pondered who had instilled this habit into her. “My father owned a bookstore. He was a voracious reader, maintaining that he needed to know what he was selling to people. Rebecca – my former boss, you met her at lunch once?” When Helena nodded confirmation, Myka went on, “She did the same. Didn’t so much demand it from me as silently expect it. Not that it was ever a chore,” she added, and then, because she was too truthful to let that stand on its own, amended it to, “or barely ever, anyway. I did pick books that I thought would interest me, and mostly they did.”

“But never comic books,” Helena said, and Myka was happy to see a small smile curl the other woman’s lips.

She chuckled quietly. “Nope. What good is a book that you’ve finished in under an hour?”

“I hear there is artwork to take in – to which one could devote more time than that.”

At this, Myka’s eyebrows rose. “You hear?”

Helena, a spark of amusement now clearly visible in her eyes, nodded. “From a certain bookstore owner of my acquaintance.”

“You’ve been talking to Rebecca.” Myka’s voice was flat with disbelief. 

“I have indeed. You were so very involved with other guests during your birthday lunch.”

“I was-” Myka spluttered, then spotted Helena’s smile. “You are teasing me. You are honest-to-God teasing me.” She returned the smile with interest. “See, I knew this was a good idea.”

Leena chose that moment to announce dinner. Helena, for once, actively tucked in, apparently realizing her hunger only when actually concentrating on the food. Conversation flowed easy over the next thirty minutes or so, then Helena pushed her empty plate back and looked up at Myka, head askance. “About that walk, then,” she said, and yet another ten minutes later, Myka found herself on the most coveted beach in the state of California.

“This is beautiful,” she said in hushed tones, turning to take it all in. The beach truly was pristine – no piers, no hawkers, no umbrellas, no clutter. Just a long, long stretch of fine white sand. “How…” she shook her head and cut herself off, certain that this was too personal to ask.

“How did I get to live here?” Helena asked, however, and when Myka nodded, gave a small laugh. “I’m sure you have a theory or two, Ms. Bering. That brain of yours isn’t happy until it can hypothesize.”

“I…” Myka began, then frowned. Helena’s words were as good as permission, a challenge really, but still she felt oddly reluctant. “I really don’t want to pry,” she finished, therefore.

“It’s alright,” Helena said. “Here, I’ll make it easier for you by not looking at you whilst you speak.” And she linked their arms to lead them eastwards on the beach.

Myka wasn’t too sure that this was an improvement. Helena’s skin, while still almost sickly white, was warm on hers; Helena’s body was close, supple, its movements as elegant as ever, even walking barefoot in the sand. It made Myka’s throat run dry. What was it that would be easier when Helena wasn’t looking at her? Oh, yes. Theories. 

“From what I heard,” she began, “someone back at the turn of the twentieth century bought this place. Probably snatched up the whole thing for something like a thousand bucks, when these days you wouldn’t get half a spot in a parking garage for that kind of money. And then they hung on to it, because not everyone can be bought off by a bucket load of money from oil barons or property developers.” She gestured around herself. “I mean, it’s gorgeous, right? And then when they died, maybe it was in their will that the place never be sold, something along those lines. Or maybe the heirs just loved the place too.”

Helena snorted – by now Myka had come to know that reaction and was no longer surprised at the inelegance of it that seemed so at odds with how Helena usually behaved. “I hadn’t pegged you as such a romantic, Myka.” She gave Myka a small, sidelong smile. “It was a little more than ‘a thousand bucks’, but essentially you’re correct. If memory serves, fifteen thousand dollars at contemporary value. About three hundred and fifty thousand today, which is,” she mirrored Myka’s earlier gesture, “a steal, really, even considering that it happened before the oil rush.”

Myka’s jaw dropped, and she stopped walking. “You… that… I mean…” She cleared her throat. “I mean, three hundred fifty grand is still a lot of money these days, but…” she turned her baffled eyes from Helena and fixed them on the sea. She cleared her throat again. “My, um… my first paycheck cleared last week,” she said in a carefully neutral voice. 

“A tad more than three hundred and fifty grand, I believe.”

Myka blinked around a sudden tightness in her throat. “I haven’t really… I mean I knew what your salary was, but… I mean…” Her voice dropped away. Then she shook her head. “No talk of company matters,” she announced firmly, and looked at Helena again, head tilted. “So that’s how someone back then got hold of the place,” she said, “but how do you come in?”

Helena gave a small laugh and seemed about to say something, but then to think better of it. “It stayed in the family, I think you could say,” she said, and tugged slightly on Myka’s arm to signal she wanted to continue walking. “And you were right with your assumption about the heirs loving the place just like the original owner – I do enjoy the place,” she said with a deep intake of breath, and gave Myka’s arm a squeeze before adding, “as I enjoy the walk and the company. Thank you.”

Myka’s lips quirked into a small smile. “Good,” she said. “You’re very welcome.” 

-_-_-

Just like Myka driving to Rainbow Cove had become a standard, now she and Helena spending their evenings together became a fixture. After a week of these evenings, Myka still hadn’t asked what Helena was working on in her underground lab or workshop or if she was the infamous “Iron Woman”; she wanted her friendship with Helena to return to more stable footing before she did, and she hadn’t gotten more tabloid articles or, god forbid, video recordings handed to her by Artie. 

Helena, for her part, certainly didn’t tell. The only signs Myka had to go on were smudges of oil on Helena’s hands or sometimes face before she washed up for dinner; metal shavings on her clothes, and on one memorable evening, a singed strand of hair. Myka carefully refrained from mentioning any of her theories, though. Instead, each evening at as close to seven as she could make it, what with Los Angeles evening traffic, she arrived at one specific door deep inside the house where, unfailingly, Helena would meet her; sometimes already in new clothes and drying her hair, sometimes not. They would head to the dining room where, unfailingly, Leena would serve something enticing. After that, unfailingly, talk of anything-but-work would happen – sometimes during a walk on the beach, sometimes on a patio overlooking the ocean, sometimes in the mansion’s incredible library. 

Myka found herself enamored with the house – the parts of it she was allowed to see, anyway – but even more, she found herself drawn ever closer to the Helena she got to know during those evenings. The woman was a delight to be around, particularly now that they were outside the bounds of employer and employee. Sometimes Myka wondered where the driven, obsessed woman had gone to, or if Helena was truly that good at compartmentalizing, but a short one-on-one conversation with Pete assured her that driven Helena still worked in her secret part of the house every single day. And yet, during their evenings together, Helena showed none of that.

Myka had her suspicions as to why that was. She herself had gone through trauma, considering the way Sam had died and her role in it; everyone, she kept telling herself, dealt with that in their own way. If Helena wanted those ninety minutes with Myka to be free of whatever she was dealing with, so be it. It wasn’t Myka’s place, really it wasn’t, to criticize. 

On day five, Helena hesitantly, almost shyly, asked Leena if she wanted to join them for dinner. Myka watched as Helena, with many a stumble, explained how she’d rather have a friend than a personal assistant, and if there was any chance of that happening. Leena replied that she was up to giving it a try, and Helena’s beaming smile outshone the sun that evening. The next day, Pete joined them, citing that if everyone got to enjoy food together, he wanted in on it too. Both he and Leena brought a different, differently positive energy to the table and, one rainy evening when Helena excused herself to go to the bathroom, Leena turned to Myka.

“Thank you,” she said simply, in a low voice. “I’m not sure if you have any idea how much Helena needed to be taken out of her thoughts, but thank you.”

Myka swallowed the last bite of her linguine and tilted her head at Leena. “I thought I had a bit of an inkling, but now I’m not so sure, the way you’re putting this.”

Leena’s eyes flitted to the door and to Pete, and, when the former stayed resolutely shut and the latter gave her an encouraging nod, she leaned even closer, and, in an even lower voice, said, “I can read auras, you know? People’s state of mind, if you will; if they’re calm, or happy, or agitated, that kind of thing, but deeper stuff as well.”

Myka’s eyes widened in surprise. “You have a quirk, too?” she asked. She knew there were people who had them – extra-sensory perception, talents, mutations; no matter what people called them, they existed. But they were rarely talked about. Myka didn’t think they were malignant or worrisome, as some people did, but then she had one, herself. “Mine is photographic memory,” she admitted. 

“I got one too,” Pete said. “I get vibes if something really good or really bad is going to happen. So, all of us got something.” He grinned at Myka, then gestured towards Leena. “But, Leena, you were talking.”

Leena flashed him a quick smile. “Thanks.” Then, back to Myka, she went on, “Your presence, the walks the two of you take, the conversations, eating together like this; all of this is good for her, I can see that, beyond just the tone of her skin or the way she holds herself.”

Myka could hear quite clearly what Leena wasn’t saying: that before all of that, the ‘beyond’ that Leena was able to see, Helena’s aura as it were, had been worrying the other woman. She nodded, trying to project as much. “Thank you for telling me,” she said. 

“Thank you for simply accepting that,” Leena gave back. “There aren’t many people who wouldn’t be asking a million questions right now. But then that’s one thing I’ve seen in you from the start,” she added with a cheery little smile. “Your integrity. There are certain things that you really won’t compromise on, no matter how curious you might be or how much it might cost you in other aspects.”

Unable to meet Leena’s frank gaze, Myka lowered her eyes. Her cheeks were heating up, and that was something she hated. “Isn’t that normal, though? I mean, it should be,” she said defiantly.

“She’s coming back,” Pete said and then added, more loudly, “Yeah, Myka, tell us more about your cute agent back at the airport.”

Myka knew he was ribbing her to explain away the flush in her cheeks, but the glare she shot at him was authentic enough. “Okay, so first of all,” she began as the door opened and Helena stepped through, “no talk of business, and that’s business; second of all, he’s not _my_ cute agent-”

“Oh, so he could be mine, then?” Leena said, leaning forwards with a grin. 

“Leena, the man who’s good enough for you has yet to be created,” Pete said with a sigh. “I’ll go get dessert. You did make dessert, right? Please say you made dessert.” 

Leena tossed her napkin onto the table. “As if I would dare to not make dessert when you’re at the table.” She stood. “It’s gonna need some assembling,” she added. “If you promise not to steal anything, you can come help me.”

“Ooooh,” Pete said, but Helena’s upheld hand stopped him from rising from the table.

“Will the two of you hold on a minute, please,” Helena said, who was still standing near the door. “Myka, would you mind awfully much if we postponed dessert? There’s something I’d like to show you, and it has quite a small window of opportunity.”

A few minutes later, the two of them were heading out onto the ocean in a small motor boat. Helena was teasing a surprising amount of speed out of the engine. She was confident at the boat’s controls, and the water was relatively calm after the earlier rainstorm, so Myka found herself leaning back and enjoying the ride as much as she was able to with the spray of waves in her face and the – admittedly slight – sprinkle of rain in her hair. It had been pouring not even half an hour ago, but the brunt of it seemed over, otherwise nothing and no one, not even Helena’s most pleading smile, would have gotten Myka into an open boat out on the open sea.

About a half a mile out, Helena reduced their speed and turned the boat in a wide curve to face back towards the beach, then cut the engine. “And now we wait,” she announced, and added, with a glance at the sky, “Just a little, hopefully.” She gave Myka a slightly worried once-over. “Perhaps we should have brought mackintoshes,” she said. “I’m afraid your hair is rather a mess, if a glorious one.”

Myka brought a hair to her curls self-consciously and blushed to find that Helena was right – about the mess, anyway. Myka herself would never call her hair glorious on the best of days, and Helena doing so was… Myka carefully didn’t think too much about what exactly that was. With a sigh, she rolled her eyes. “That’s me washing my hair two nights in a row. This better be worth it.” 

“Time will tell,” Helena said, casting a glance up at the clouds, “and probably not before long.” She turned her gaze back to the cove. “I should come out here more often,” she said quietly. 

“It does look beautiful,” Myka nodded. The yellow house stood out even without the sun lighting up its cheerful exterior; this early in summer, the hills behind it were still green, and above them, the rain storm that had just passed still threatened darkly, promising more rain to the Santa Monica Mountains beyond. If it hadn’t been for the clean white sand of the beach and the bright house atop it, it would have made for a brooding image; as it was, there was still an ominous energy to the view.

And then the sun broke out behind them, and the hills were bathed in all the colors of the rainbow.

“Rainbow Cove,” Helena breathed. 

Myka found she’d been holding her breath, and exhaled softly. “It’s gorgeous.” When Helena didn’t answer, Myka assumed that she was simply taking in the view in silence, which was certainly a valid option – but then she chanced a glance sideways, and saw that Helena’s eyes were full and her jaw was working. Without stopping to think, she reached out and touched Helena’s arm. “Hey…”

Helena flinched, as though she’d forgotten that Myka was there, flinched hard enough that the boat rocked from the force of it. She took a step away from Myka’s hand, shook her head and gave Myka a smile that was as fake as anything Myka had ever seen her give yellow press reporters. “It’s nothing, darling, thank you.” 

Myka blinked. Before she could say anything, though, Helena had bent over the boat’s controls to start up the engine.


	7. Chapter 7

The next day, Myka approached Rainbow Cove with more trepidation than she ever had. Helena had all but sent her away the day before, claiming a headache that was totally just as fake as her smile had been. 

Okay, so some people didn’t like to be seen in a vulnerable state, Myka told herself. Some people didn’t like to be touched, either – although Helena had certainly never held back from touching others. And while Myka wasn’t a very touchy-feely person and thus had never reached out to touch Helena before, Helena had never seemed to mind Jane putting a restraining hand on her arm, or Amanda laughing so much that she’d have to hold herself up by hanging off Helena’s shoulder. Maybe it had been the combination of being vulnerable and physical contact? Whatever it had been, Myka had obviously overstepped, and now her heart beat in her throat as she approached the old tunnel road. Would the entrance even still open at her clicker? Maybe Helena had-

It opened, and Myka released a breath she’d been holding since entering the tunnel. She’d half expected being left standing in front of a gate closed to her forever – Helena did have a flair for the dramatic sometimes. Yet when she pulled into her garage, it was Leena who stood there. 

“There’s something I’m supposed to show you,” she said. “Helena says she’s sorry and she’ll be along in a minute.”

Myka, eyebrows raised, trailed behind Leena as they made their way towards a part of the underground area that Myka had never been in before. As they walked, she wondered – ‘Helena says she’s sorry’, but sorry for what? Her reaction yesterday? Or her absence today? And that something Myka was to be shown – Myka hoped like hell it wasn’t a silver-and-green armored suit.

Then, a thought hit Myka with a suddenness that made her stumble and drove all thoughts of flying vigilantes out of her mind. 

Helena was grieving. 

It wasn’t just trauma about what happened in Afghanistan, it was grief – maybe related, maybe not. Maybe from earlier in her life, but brought back or exacerbated by the abduction and subsequent events. But grief it surely was; Myka knew the signs. 

_Maybe someone in Afghanistan,_ Myka thought. _Maybe someone connected to rainbows somehow. And then when she saw the rainbow yesterday, she thought about them and I… I intruded._ No wonder Helena had flinched the way she did. 

She realized that Leena had stopped with her, and was now giving her a piercing gaze. Then Leena nodded, and, without saying a word, turned to lead the way again. It wasn’t far before they arrived at a firmly closed door.

“Helena asked me to take you here and start explaining everything to you,” Leena said. “It’s gonna take some time and probably strain your belief quite a bit, so brace yourself.” She smiled at Myka as she opened the door. 

Whatever Myka had imagined she’d be seeing behind that door, it wasn’t what met her eyes.

The room was easily the most old-fashioned Myka had ever seen in this house. If Leena had told her that it hadn’t been touched since the house was built – which, Myka had learned, had been in 1888 – she’d have believed her, no strain at all. The room was spacious, with a couple of easy chairs upholstered in dark bronze leather and a card table between and an old-fashioned globe behind them. Dark wooden bookshelves lines three walls, filled to the brim with rows upon rows of old tomes. A row of windows in the fourth wall poured golden sunset light over everything, lighting up a few motes of dust in the air and a large contraption covered in dustsheets in the corner behind the chairs. 

Not a single silver-and-green armored suit in sight. Myka released the breath she’d been holding.

Leena had waited in the doorway until Myka had finished taking in the room, but now she strode forwards and indicated the chairs. “Have a seat,” she said and then pointed to the newspaper on the card table. “Have a read, too. Page 36,” she added, “bottom left corner.”

Myka stared at her for a moment, then at the newspaper. Then she huffed another sigh, sat down and took it. It didn’t just look old, it felt old. It smelled old. She’d held vintage newspapers before, in Rebecca’s store – this one was… She checked the top. “1889,” she breathed. “Wow, this is old.”

Leena chuckled. “Not the only old thing in here, I think you’ll find. I’ll keep you company until-”

“My arrival,” Helena’s voice came from the doorway. “Thank you, Leena. I… will take it from here.”

Leena gave Helena a long look, then nodded. “I’ll be in the living room if you need me,” she said before she left.

“Thank you,” Helena told her retreating back. Then she turned to Myka. “Please allow me to apologize for how insufferably I treated you yesterday,” she said. “You did not deserve such rudeness.”

Myka blushed. “I, um… it’s alright,” she mumbled. 

A look passed between them. Myka tried to convey that she understood grief, that she understood clamping up and shutting other people out, that she was there if Helena changed her mind. If that was what was going on, anyway. Whatever Helena read in Myka’s eyes caused her own gaze to soften, though. “It most definitely is not alright,” she insisted, but her voice was accepting. “In any case I am grateful that you’ve returned, and I have decided to take yesterday’s… incident as…” her voice trailed away, and for a moment, her expression became hesitant. Then she shook herself out of it. “As incentive to… open up to you,” she finished.

“You don’t need to,” Myka protested immediately. “Whatever it is, it’s… it’s yours. Don’t feel like you have to-”

“Ah, but I want to,” Helena interrupted her. “I won’t say that I haven’t received ever-so-unsubtle encouragement from certain quarters,” and her eyes traveled to the door that Leena had shut behind herself a minute ago. “Not as a result of yesterday, I might add, or not _only_ as a result of that,” she continued, looking back at Myka. “Said encouragement has been forthcoming since your first visit here.”

Suddenly uncomfortable, Myka shifted in her seat. Was she being set up? Was Leena-?

As if Helena had seen Myka’s thoughts, she held up a hand and said, “I’ve been told – not just told, however. I _know_ , quite without being told, that I need a friend – not just for socializing every now and then, as I do with Amanda and Jane, but a… confidante. Thus, I would like to confide something to you, if you are amenable.”

Sometimes Helena sounded like a character straight from a Dickens novel. Myka wondered if that, too, was some kind of coping mechanism. Whichever words Helena was using, though, she was reaching out, and Myka rushed to accept that. “Yes,” she said quickly, “anytime.” 

Helena nodded. Then, of all things, she gestured towards the newspaper. “As Leena said, page 36, bottom left.”

Myka picked up the paper with a confused frown. It was an issue of the Sunday Times, from London, England, thick as a brick and about as heavy. Myka had no idea what kind of secret an English nineteenth-century newspaper might harbor, much less how it could be connected to the Englishwoman standing in front of her right now, but Leena’s words came back to her. _It’s gonna take some time and probably strain your belief quite a bit, so brace yourself._ Myka peeled back the pages slowly and reverentially and not a little nervously about what she might encounter. Page 36 was in the middle of a section crowded with articles about society events in London. In the lower left corner, Myka saw the headline “H.G. Wells meets NUWSS London Chapter” above a black-and-white photo of the famous author with about a dozen suffragettes. She looked up at Helena in confusion, but the other woman pointedly nodded her chin at the paper. 

Myka looked more closely at the article, starting with the photo’s caption. “Left to right, Florence Balgarnie, Millicent Fawcett, H.G. Wells, his sister Helena-” she stopped, frowned, brought the paper closer to her eyes, tilting it to catch the sunshine. Then she let it sink again, fingers and arms suddenly weak, and looked up at Helena. “His _sister_ Helena?” she managed.

“That,” Helena said simply, “would be me, yes.”

Myka blinked. “But… but _how?”_ There was no denying that the woman standing at Wells’ right in the picture bore a remarkable resemblance to Helena, and apparently shared her name, but-

 _…probably strain your belief quite a bit…  
_  
“By way,” Helena said, “of my first time machine.”

“Your first…”

 _…strain your belief…  
_  
“You’re sitting in it, as a matter of fact,” Helena pointed out. 

Myka’s eyes dropped to the sturdy, old-fashioned armrest of the chair she was sitting in. She blinked again. “A chair,” she said incredulously. “Your time machine is a chair.”

_…quite a bit._

__Well, this sure wasn’t about vigilantism.

“Well, not just a chair,” Helena amended, walking over to the dust-sheet-covered whatever-it-was behind where Myka sat. Turning in her chair, Myka watched as Helena grasped the sheet with two hands and – with her usual flair for the dramatic – flung them off.

As Myka’s eyes adjusted to the change in the light – the sun was no longer reflected off white sheets, but shone now onto much darker materials – she saw three large and variously shaped upright boxes, on a platform big enough to easily fit the chair and its twin. There were, in fact, fasteners on the platform floor that seemed like they’d fit the two chairs’ legs perfectly. Dust motes danced merrily around the installation, but not a lot – this room hadn’t been left undisturbed since the early twentieth century; at the very least it had been cleaned regularly, the dust sheets washed and pressed before returning them to their place. Myka’s eyes roved bronze fittings and valves attached to the boxes, dials with slender black pointers, and a display of rotary numbers on one box that read out ‘March 2nd, 2008’. 

“I reckoned, back then, that giving the world some time to become a better place might be a good idea,” she heard Helena say darkly. “A century seemed too pat, but the symmetry of one hundred and eleven years appealed to me. Alas, it seems it wasn’t enough. However, at least this day and age gave me access to technology to improve upon the design, which was greatly necessary.” 

“You…” Myka shook her head to clear it. “You traveled more than a century into the future?” 

Helena laughed, but there was no humor behind it. “Oh, wish it were so,” she said with a sigh. “No, I did not. That was not how my machine worked. To put it in the simplest terms, it took me outside of time, preserved my body while the years passed by.” She shook herself slightly and took a deep breath. “Originally, yes, I had intended for it to take its passengers through time, to wherever they wanted to go.”

“Just like in the story,” Myka whispered. Her throat was dry.

Helena nodded again. “Just like in the story,” she confirmed. “Which was based quite heavily on my ideas and research, I might add.” With another sigh, she folded the dust sheet around her arms and sat down in the second chair, hugging the fabric close to her chest. “Charles, my brother, who you know as H.G. Wells, simply provided the mustache,” she went on and, with a bitter twist to her mouth, added, “A century ago it was easier to believe in the possibility of a time machine than in the reality that a woman thought one up.” She stared ahead of her, eyes dark with anger and hurt.

“But it didn’t work the way you intended,” Myka said, prompting Helena to go on.

“What? Oh. No, it didn’t,” Helena sighed. The twist had dug in around her mouth and was tingeing her voice and her eyes now. “I just wanted to save her,” she said tonelessly. “I just wanted to go back and save my Christina.”

Myka had no idea what to reply to that. So Helena _had_ lost someone, but who? A lover? A family member? Obviously a loved one, to judge from the barely concealed pain that was back in Helena’s eyes, more than a hundred years after whatever had happened. Pain so deep that it had motivated her to build something that would allow her to travel back to save that person?

It sounded fantastical even for this day and age, much less the nineteenth century. And yet Myka did not get the sense that Helena was deceiving her, and there _was_ that photo, and Leena’s words about strained belief.

A loud clonking noise startled her. She looked at Helena and saw that the other woman had made her way over to the machine again and had, apparently, just kicked it. The dust sheet lay discarded on the empty chair.

“Over and over again I tried,” Helena said, in a voice far calmer than that of a person who’d just kicked a heavy bronze box. “I found a way of projecting at least my consciousness back to when it happened, into another person’s body, but try though I might, I could not change a thing. Time and time again I tried; time and time again I failed. The ink with which our lives are inscribed is indelible, and my daughter, my Christina, lay murdered again and again and again.”

Murdered. Her daughter. Myka felt gutted. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. She doubted that Helena heard her. 

“Robbed of the possibility to save her,” the other woman went on, hand white-knuckled around a thick cable that came out of the box’ top, “I set out to revenge her.” Her eyes flicked over to Myka briefly, and she smiled another humorless smile. “We all think, do we not, in our agony, that causing others pain will soothe our hurt. And we all find that it does not help. Some realize this early enough – I did not.”

Myka’s stomach plummeted even further at these words. She’d learned about cases like this in training for the Secret Service – revenge born out of grief was a powerful motivator. She knew what it could make people do. What had it prompted Helena to do?

What was it prompting her to do today? Myka thought back to the tabloid articles she’d read – none of them had mentioned girls as victims or bystanders, specifically, but-

“The deeds I did,” Helena went on, in an almost indifferent voice now, “were difficult to connect to me – especially in a time that rarely imagined women capable of committing such atrocities – but even after relocating to the United States, I knew that at some point, the police would come knocking. I simply hoped that I would be able to rework my machine, build it into something that would take me far away from where my heart lay bleeding.” She gave the machine an almost friendly pat with her hand, then pushed herself away from it and returned to stand in front of Myka. “I did not even test it before I sat in it. If it killed me, what did I care?” She huffed slightly, not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. “I had put my affairs in order; filed patents for most of my inventions, founded a company to exploit them, drew up statutes and accounts to provide for my future self so that I might lack nothing to try and build, in the twenty-first century, another machine that would help me achieve what I failed at in the two centuries before that. If none of that would be mine, but blessed oblivion instead, I did not care.

“As it turned out, oblivion was not where I was headed,” Helena continued darkly. “My consciousness was not suspended as my body was; and without a target to attach it to, as it had when I traveled back in time, it hung in the darkness, alone with itself.”

“You were awake?!” Myka couldn’t help but exclaim in horror. 

Helena shrugged with another huff. “Offers a lady time to think,” she said with a nonchalance Myka felt certain was as fake as yesterday’s headache had been. Before she could say something along those lines, though, Helena went on, “After awakening here and accustoming myself to this age and its technological advances, I started working on my next model; the one that would succeed where, in the past, I’d failed for lack of adequate equipment. However, I could not figure out how to power it to the extent necessary, considering it was to be a mobile unit.” She tapped her chest where the miniature reactor (Mark II) glowed mutely through layers of fabric, drawing attention to something Myka had tried very hard to ignore ever since she’d first been shown it. “And then I was abducted and forced to build the solution in a remote cave in Afghanistan,” Helena concluded her tale. “And I should very much like to show you the results of my work.”

She took a few steps towards the door and gestured for Myka to get up, but Myka shook her head, feeling overwhelmed. “H.G. Wells is actually a woman,” she said, focusing on one fact out of the many that were dancing in her mind. “I’m going to have to process this.”

This, now, won a more genuine smile from Helena. “Indeed I am,” she said, picking up the dust sheet and folding it haphazardly again. She deposited it over the chair’s back rest and propped her arms onto it. “So you can add me to your list of your favorite female authors of science fiction, if you please. Right at the beginning, if you stay in reverse alphabetical order,” she added almost smugly.

Myka laughed weakly. Then she frowned, and focused on Helena. “You… were trapped with your grief for a hundred years.”

Helena’s answering laugh was dry. “It sounds incredibly dramatic when you put it that way, darling.” Grimacing, she ran both her hands through her hair and added, dropping her gaze to the floor, “I’d much rather not talk about that particular part, to be frank.”

“Of course,” Myka replied immediately. Helena had every right to talk about precisely what she wanted to, and not talk about what she didn’t want to. “Jeez, yeah. No problem.” She stood up. “You wanted to show me something? The results of your work?”

“Yes!” Helena’s answer was enthusiastic, wiping away all tiredness, anger, or grief from her features. “If you would follow me, please.” And to make doubly sure – at least that was what Myka assumed; or perhaps to make up for her flinching yesterday – she took Myka’s hand to lead her away from the room and down the corridor. Her fingers were slender but strong, her intention clear – Myka had no incentive whatsoever to deny the contact and thus no choice but to follow. 

A short while later they arrived at a door that was just as secured as the one Myka had stood in front of a few weeks ago: an entrance to Helena’s ‘secret lair’, or workshop or whatever it was, if not the one Myka remembered. Then again, who knew how many there were?

Myka made sure to look aside as Helena entered the combination that would open the lock, then followed her through.

“Caturanga,” Helena said over her shoulder as she took Myka through the door to the unknown, “log Ms. Myka Bering as cleared for access on all levels.”

Myka blinked in confusion and was just about to ask what on Earth Helena meant when-

“Very well, Ms. Wells,” came a disembodied, male, British-accented voice from all around them – which was a completely empty little ante-room with yet another heavily secured door. “Ms. Myka Bering has been given access to all levels. Good evening, Ms. Bering.”

“Good… uh, good evening,” Myka gave back on autopilot, then turned to Helena, who in the meantime had opened the second door. “What the hell is going on? What – _who_ is that?” Did another person work here that she’d never seen? That Leena and Pete hadn’t told her about? That Pete and Leena had never seen?!

Helena smiled thinly. “That is CATURANGA, my assistant,” she explained. “An artificial intelligence I developed myself. As for what this is-” she indicated the door with a nod and motioned for Myka to go through first, “-welcome to endless wonder.”

Myka didn’t know what to look at first. 

_A storage room,_ was her first thought, but then things came into sharper focus _. This is a workshop._ She saw not one but two welding robots, a handful of CNC machines, a dozen clear drawing boards both vertical and horizontal, row upon row of shelves stacked with who-knew-what, several desks and workbenches, at least three laptops-

And, on two stands in the center of it, two silver metal suits; one with blue, the other with green details.

Her heart sank through the floor. “Helena, what have you been doing?”

Myka had, of course, seen photos of the wreckage of the first armored suit, the one Helena had built in Afghanistan – but these were not that. _That_ had been rough, improvised, pieced together from oil drums and car parts. _These_ , now that Myka saw them close-up, looked sleek, streamlined, light, fast. _Shining armor,_ the thought came unbidden to Myka, _for a knight of the twenty-first century._

And up close, even more unmistakably Wells handiwork. 

Helena’s smile grew at once proud and pained. “My time machines,” she said, and then corrected herself, “newest model, that is. My old machine would only take my consciousness to the past, into the body of another person. _This_ will take all of me to the past, literally, _physically_ , and allow me to interact with it. It is finished and awaits testing.”

“Newest model,” Myka repeated. This felt surreal, and she wasn’t sure if this was because of the revelation of just who Helena was and how she’d come to be here, or because of who _else_ Helena was – namely, Iron Woman, a goddamn _vigilante_ – or because Myka’s senses and brain were overloaded by everything rushing in on her.

A spark of actual amusement flashed through Helena’s smile, and she nodded. Holding out her arm, she guided Myka to one of several workshop stools. “Indeed,” she said. “Are you quite well, Myka? You look somewhat shaken.”

Myka sank down gratefully. “Sorry,” she added, running a hand across her forehead. “I guess I am. Or, you know, still processing the whole thing.”

“It was a lot to spring on you, wasn’t it,” Helena said dryly. “It seems I’m going to have to beg your forgiveness yet again. I must say I’m glad you’re taking it as equanimously as you are.”

Myka huffed out a laugh. “While we’re on things you can be glad about,” she said, “how about the simple fact that I believe you?” She gestured to where they’d come from, and then around the room.

Helena’s eyebrows rose. “Do not tell me you’re wondering if I set this whole thing up just to prove my tale.” 

Myka tried not to show how thrown she was. “Oh,” she said lightly, “the thought did cross my mind somewhere between, ‘Holy crap, H.G. Wells is a woman,’ and ‘Oh, sure, a time machine in a space suit.’” She shook her head and blinked. That had come out slightly less nonchalant than she’d shot for. “I mean I don’t know why you’d go to lengths like this just to deceive me, so…” she shrugged and shook her head again. 

“Myka, will you look at me?”

Myka gritted her teeth. She hadn’t looked at Helena, not really looked at her, as in met her eyes, since the woman had started revealing all these… things. Things like having committed crimes to avenge her daughter. Things like ‘atrocities’.

“Myka?”

Helena was hunkering down in front of her, as if to forcibly insert herself into Myka’s line of sight. Her hands were warm on Myka’s knees. Flesh and blood, looking about as young or old as Myka’s own, if paler and with a few smudges of blackened grease in the creases of her knuckles and the beds of her fingernails. 

H.G. Wells, born in 1866. 

A woman, and mother of a murdered daughter. 

What had these hands done? Committed atrocities. Built a time machine – or at least some kind of suspended animation chamber? Constructed not just one, but two miniature fusion reactors that the best and brightest minds at Wells Industries _still_ were unable to replicate.

Stopped two bank robberies and one armed burglary.

Myka’s eyes flickered over to the suits. 

“Why two, though?” she asked. It wasn’t the most urgent of all the questions filling her brain; it was merely the easiest to ask, and thus the one that came out. And it served the purpose of diverting Helena, too. Myka watched in silence as Helena made her way over to the two suits and gave the blue-and-silver one a pat, just as fondly as she’d patted her other machine, right atop the inert arc reactor embedded into its breastplate. It lit up as if in welcome.

“Why, one for me, one for my Christina,” Helena said, as if it was the most self-evident fact in the history of facts. “You’d hardly have me save her life and then leave her in 1891, now would you?”

“You can’t-” Myka spluttered. “You can’t be planning to bring her here?”

“And why the hell not!” Helena suddenly snarled. “She was only nine years old! I can’t leave her there?! Everything I’ve done was always geared towards saving her, but why on Earth should saving her mean leaving her to live out her life in the twentieth century, far away from me in both time and distance? Or me staying with her in an age that treated women as sub-human?” She inhaled sharply through her nose. “No, I cannot do that. I will not do that. You cannot ask me to, Myka. I will take these suits to the past; I will find my daughter; I will clad her in the second suit; I will return to the present with her.” She sounded as though these statements were immutable, facts as certain as the natural laws – which, to be fair, she _was_ proposing to break. Then she tilted her head and looked at Myka questioningly. “Will you help me test them?”


	8. Chapter 8

Myka hung her head, took the suit’s face plate off, and coughed weakly. “Now I know why movies do training montages,” she said and wiped her brow. The metal glove came away glistening deep red amid the silver and blue. “The first time somebody fails at something it’s entertaining, shows the viewer how difficult the task is. No one wants to see the trainee superhero slam their suit into the wall seventeen times in a row, do they.” It was the following day, a Saturday, and by now Myka was questioning why on Earth she’d agreed to this. Then she remembered – voice of reason. Helena hadn’t seemed too stable; she needed someone to watch out for her. Myka could be that for her, _wanted_ to be that for her. That was, however, before she’d been put into this infernal contraption.

“I’m so dreadfully sorry,” Helena said, taking a wet cloth and starting to clean the blood off Myka’s forehead. “If you’d just let me activate the remote pilot-” 

“No!” Myka protested with all the force she could muster. “This thing shoots plasma exhaust from its hands and feet and has a fusion reactor right over my heart; I do _not_ want anyone else to call the shots but me.” _Voice of reason_ , she repeated to herself.

“And CATURANGA,” Helena reminded her. “Even now the suit controls are smart, as you put it these days. If they were fully manual, the suit would be unmanageable.”

With a groan, Myka plopped her head against the wall. “Fine, yeah, whatever.”

“I shall take no offense at this,” CATURANGA’s disembodied voice replied in her ears. Apparently over the room’s speakers, too, because Helena chuckled. 

“You,” Myka told the thin air, “are a fraction of an inch away from being creepy.”

“As long as he’s not _quite_ there, though,” Helena said, giving Myka’s forehead a last swipe, and then standing and reaching out a hand, “I shall continue to think I programmed him well.”

Myka ignored the outstretched hand – it wasn’t as if Helena, without wearing her own suit, could help her up in any meaningful way anyway – and stood. In fact, her suit stood, taking her body with it. “These are just as bad,” she muttered, looking at down at her armor-encased legs with disgust. 

“That’s just the servos in the joints,” Helena said. “If they weren’t there, you wouldn’t be able to-”

“-move this much weight, yes, I know,” Myka finished her sentence. “Servos and artificial intelligence predicting my intentions,” she muttered. “Why is the AI good enough to realize I’m getting up, but not good enough to stabilize my fricking flight?”

“Because I never intended it to,” Helena gave back. “Individual control for take-off and landing, AI for the in-between, if the pilot so desires. Just like planes, really.” She held out her hands towards Myka again, this time in a gesture intended to mollify. “I would like to invite you to take note of how I’m neither rhapsodizing about planes nor lamenting the fact that it was not I who invented them.”

“Oh, I’m noting,” Myka said, stretching her shoulders gingerly. “Such noble restraint.” _H.G. Wells isn’t just smart,_ she thought. _Not just an inventor, and an incredibly good-looking one at that. H.G. Wells has a massive ego, and is offended at anyone else inventing stuff because that means she didn’t think of it first._ And then she thought, like she had practically once every hour since yesterday, _H.G. Wells is a woman.  
_  
“I automated the controls,” that female H.G. Wells was saying, “only to the degree necessary to, as I said, move the suit at all. Anything beyond that is optional. I thought you’d be all for that, with your insistence on agency and control.” She looked at Myka expectantly.

“Within reason!” Myka snapped. Her head really smarted. Yes, the suit had taken most of the impacts, however Helena had achieved _that_ , but still, a wall was a wall and seventeen times were seventeen times. “I’m perfectly happy with my car having an automatic gear shift and power steering!” She started taking off the suit manually; the automated process still spooked her. “I just,” she continued, her words punctuated by snapping off parts of the armor and plonking them onto the table, “want – this – to – work.”

“I detect no concussion,” CATURANGA announced just before Myka removed the rest of the helmet. 

Myka groaned in reply.

It didn’t help that somehow Helena was able to fly _her_ suit with an ease and elegance that felt almost insulting in their perfection. It also didn’t help that Helena had proved unable to explain how she did it in any meaningful way. ‘I just do it’ was _really_ no help at all. Yeah, okay, so she obviously had had more practice than Myka – and had stopped a few felonies during practice flights, most likely – but still. _‘I just do it’ my bruised and aching ass,_ Myka thought. 

Unbidden, the specter of Myka’s father rose in front of her eyes. ‘Well, everyone’s got to learn to crawl before they learn to walk, kiddo,’ he was saying, in his usual disappointed, disparaging tones. Myka had lost count of how often he’d told her that and in which circumstances; it seemed like whatever she tried to do, he’d find fault with it.

Learn to crawl, though… Myka looked at the glove in her hand and blinked. “I’ve got an idea,” she breathed, and put it back on.

Three minutes later, she was hovering – stable, at the height she wanted. Who cared that she was also crouched on all fours? Four points of contact – or thrust – were definitely more stable than two. She resisted the urge to ball her fist in triumph; the thrusters in her gloves would absolutely react to that, and she’d fly into the wall again, she just knew it. That wall basically had a Myka-in-a-metal-suit-shaped imprint by now.

“Look at you!” Helena cheered behind her. “Now try to straighten up!”

Myka increased the thrust of her gloves gently, gently, wobbling a little when her hands passed her knees, stretching her arms a little wider for stability. “Feels a bit like I need one of those ice skating penguins,” she said. 

“A what kind of penguin?” 

Myka laughed out loud at the irritable confusion in Helena’s voice. It was a bit more understandable now that she knew the culture gap didn’t just span the Atlantic Ocean but also more than a century of passed time. “When you teach toddlers to skate,” she said, concentrating on standing up straighter, “you have these plastic penguin figurines for them to push so that they don’t fall over. To teach them balance, y’know?”

“I shall take your word for it,” Helena said, clearly miffed. Myka heard her scribble in a notebook and had no doubt that later today, Youtube would be searched for “ice skating penguins”, whatever kind of result _that_ might yield.

“It really does have quite a lot in common with skating,” Myka said, now standing fully upright. She cocked her head as an idea hit her. “CATURANGA, can you, I don’t know, use that kind of motion as an algorithm for the flight controls?”

“Please give me a moment while I access my database of human movements,” CATURANGA replied at once. Myka held her breath until she heard, “I can indeed. Please wait while I reconfigure your control protocols.” 

There were quiet whirrs and subtle motions within the suit as the servos started to reorient themselves. “Awesome,” Myka breathed explosively, holding her body very still. “Tell me when you’re done, okay?” 

“To be sure.”

It still felt weird to talk to thin air when addressing the AI, but somewhat less so than yesterday. She had been talking to CATURANGA all day, after all. The AI even had a very dry, very subtle sense of humor. Helena had told her she’d modeled him after her mentor back in the nineteenth century, a man of formidable intellect by all accounts. At least he – it, whatever pronoun applied here – didn’t sound like yet another Star Trek rip-off, Myka thought. 

The thought that Helena was for all intents and purposes a time traveler was somehow getting easier to think, too. Probably something to do with a notebook full of ‘look up on the internet’, ‘seek out’, ‘listen to’, ‘watch’ and ‘read’ reminders.

The thought of what she might have done to her daughter’s murderers, less so. Neither Myka nor Helena had broached the topic again, but it crept into the front of Myka’s brain every time she looked at Helena for longer than a moment or two. She couldn’t help herself; she _was_ law enforcement, after all, or had been. What had Helena done? And what had she been doing as she tested this suit, or whatever it was that had brought her to Santa Monica, La Habra, Irvine, and who knew how many other places where there hadn’t been people with smartphones to snap pictures?

“I have completed the reconfiguration,” CATURANGA announced over Myka’s thoughts, and she shook them away. “Of course I was unable to access specifics of how you, Ms. Bering, move while you skate, so I used an amalgamation of contemporary Western ice skating data-”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.” Myka nodded impatiently. Then she braced her left foot, angled the right foot slightly outwards, raised both her hands slightly – and started to pirouette. “Yes!” she exclaimed. “Yes, yes, yes!” She moved her arms counter to her momentum, and the pirouette slowed and stopped, leaving her facing Helena, just as she’d wanted to. “It works!”

“It does!” Helena’s face was elated. “What an ingenious idea, Myka!” She ran up as Myka lowered herself to stand on solid ground again, and placed both her hands on the suit’s breastplate. 

_Oh, I could kiss you._ The thought hit Myka much more forcefully than the wall ever had. She blinked, grateful as she’d never been for a helmet that fully encased her head; grateful that there was no way in hell Helena could see her face right now. Her cheeks burned with mortification, her pulse raced, and still Helena’s hands were… well, basically on her breasts, even though those breasts were covered by a sixth of an inch of sheet metal.

And just as quickly, Helena was turning away and heading towards her own suit. “CATURANGA, suit!” came the command, imperious as ever, and the individual components started flying towards Helena and attaching themselves to the correct body parts. With one last jump, Helena was in her boots, up in the air, and turned back to Myka. “Let’s go out!” The words arrived via intercom in Myka’s ears.

“Go out?!” Myka replied in confusion. She fired her own thrusters up again and rose; much less wobbly this time but also nowhere near as fast as Helena. 

“Out!” Helena extended a metal-clad arm and pointed her palm towards a corner at the far end of the workshop. 

It exploded outwards. 

Myka recoiled, and barely managed to stay upright as the motion transmitted itself to her thrusters. “What the-”

“Oh, just a byproduct of the propulsion system,” Helena said in what she probably thought were reassuring tones. Behind her, through the gaping new hole in the wall, Myka could see the darkened hills and the night sky.

The hole’s edge was glowing hot. 

“This thing shoots _fireballs_ from its _palms?!”_ The article sure as hell hadn’t mentioned _that_ , and neither had Helena.

The suit didn’t shrug, but Helena’s voice sounded like a shrug when she said, “Only in emergencies, of course.”

“Hang on, hang on,” Myka said. “The suit is weaponized? Why? How? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because your model, darling, doesn’t have this ability. It’s intended for Christina, after all.”

“Then why is it full size?!” That question had been nagging at Myka all throughout yesterday and today. 

“Because it needs to be tested first,” Helena gave back immediately. “I can hardly ask a child off the street to come and test it, can I?”

“Okay, alright, point to you, but-” 

“Both suits are built to expand or contract as needed, obviously,” Helena said pointedly, slightly painedly, as if Myka should have known that this explained everything, “and that includes overall size. It will fit Christina perfectly, just as it does you, or as it would Pete. And now, no further buts, Ms. Bering,” she added, striding towards the hole, “now we fly!”

And she was off. 

Myka stared at the space where she’d been. “This isn’t happening,” she groaned. “I just learned how to stand up!” she yelled, knowing that the intercom would take her words to Helena, wherever she was. 

“Run before you walk, Myka!” came the reply. “Fly before you crawl!” And then a whoop of joy, echoed by a horizontal column of fire and sound, zoomed past the opening.

Myka cursed. She’d just arrived at the hole, and Helena’s antics had almost caused her to stumble back again. 

“Think of it more like diving, perhaps, Ms. Bering,” said CATURANGA’s helpful voice in her ear. “For low-rise forward or lateral motion while upright, the simile of ice skating is indeed very apt, but for what lies ahead – have you ever swum or dived?”

Myka rolled her eyes. “Just don’t let me hit the ground, okay? I trust the automated controls can prevent that?”

“Indeed they-”

Myka jumped.

For a second, she was falling – then she thrust out her hands towards the ground and the palm thrusters kicked in, slowing her descent while the foot thrusters added forward momentum and carried her away from the hole in the hillside. 

“Okay, okay, okay,” she mumbled. “Okay, this is working.” Satisfied that she wouldn’t crash into the ground, the hills, or the house for that matter, she looked around herself to find Helena. “Where the hell is she?”

A little blinking green dot appeared on her in-helmet display, highlighting a tiny figure moving fast. As if on cue, coordinates, heading and speed appeared next to the dot. 

“Shit,” Myka breathed. Helena was far out over the ocean and accelerating away. Then Myka saw her bank sharply upwards and fly a tight corkscrew while another shout of joy echoed over the intercom. Myka gritted her teeth. She’d been proud of flying more or less parallel to the ground, of going into the direction she wanted, and here was Helena Wells, besting her again. Her body tensed. “More speed, CATURANGA.”

“As you say, Ms. Bering.” 

The suit accelerated. Myka crossed the waterline and headed out – the suit really was _fast_. The waves blurred underneath her as she sped past, and now, now that there were no walls or ceilings around her but only open space, now Myka understood the appeal of flying and banking and turning. She gave in to the impulse as it hit her, tensed her body to the left and up, and couldn’t help but give a shout of excitement when the suit took her that way immediately. Her muscles still ached (a wall was a wall, and seventeen times were seventeen times), but her joy overrode them.

“Now you’ve got it!” Helena called out. “Isn’t it incredible?” 

The green dot grew larger on the display as Helena approached Myka, and then they were flying together, weaving around each other like swallows in the night air, not waiting for updrafts or eddies, propelled by their suits, until-

“Ms. Wells.”

Helena sighed and stopped in midair, hovering upright. Myka came to join her; she’d heard CATURANGA’s call, too. “What is it, CATURANGA?”

“There is a government agent at the door.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quote to “run before you walk” and “fly before you crawl” is from Terry Pratchett's novel Going Postal. GNU Terry Pratchett.


	9. Chapter 9

Myka stood next to Helena as they both watched one of the monitors in Helena’s workshop. On it was a feed from the security camera in the old tunnel, showing Agent Steve Jinks standing arms akimbo in the middle of the road. 

“How long has he been there?” Myka asked. Agent Jinks was here about the sighting of “Iron Woman”, she was sure, and she didn’t know what she dreaded more: that he’d confront Helena about it outright, or that it would somehow come out that she’d known about the matter, and hadn’t spoken to Helena about it. 

“He arrived two minutes and seventeen seconds ago,” CATURANGA answered. 

Helena frowned at the screen “Do I know this person? And how does he know about this place?”

Myka sighed. “This is Agent Steve Jinks,” she replied, “with the Strategic, uh… yes, Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Agency. No, Division. SHIELD, not SHEILA,” she reminded herself, recalling the badge Jinx had shown her. She rubbed her forehead, wondering what else to say. _Stick with what you know_ , she resolved. “He approached me right after you came back from Afghanistan; said he needed to talk to you about the suit. You know how hectic things got after that, but I have his card in my wallet and he’s scheduled to see me next week.”

“It would appear he got impatient,” Helena said archly, “enough so to make a house call.” Shaking her head in annoyance, she called up a control software and clicked a few buttons. On the screen, Myka watched Jinks hasten towards his car as the gate swung open. Helena turned towards the door that would lead them to the garages. “CATURANGA, suit please.”

“At once.” Metal clanked and servos whirred as Helena’s suit started to come apart. The individual pieces flew towards the stand and assembled themselves back into… well, Iron Woman – for better or worse, Myka couldn’t help but think of them as anything else anymore. 

Myka took off her own suit, then followed Helena out the door. Despite her longer legs, she had to hasten to keep up. 

When they had reached the garages, Helena turned to Myka. “Let me do the talking,” she said darkly.

“Of course,” Myka replied quickly, grateful for any chance to not be involved in what she was more and more afraid might turn out as a disaster. “He _is_ here for you.”

“Just making sure, as you Americans say,” Helena snapped. Then she sighed and ran a hand through her hair, casting her eyes upwards at Myka apologetically. “I am sorry, Myka – I’ll admit this visit has me on edge. Government interference is the last thing I want. You yourself were shocked about me weaponizing my suit; surely you can imagine how much any government agency might want to get its fingers on it. I do not intend to let them, no matter what I’d have to do.”

Myka nodded. Of course H.G. Wells – H.G. Wells!!! – wouldn’t let the government get their hands on something like this; but also, apparently, H.G. Wells, who was a woman and very much alive and right in front of Myka, fought crime in her spare time, or whatever, and that was something the government was usually just as interested in. Whichever interest was behind Agent Jinks’ visit, it wouldn’t be easy to get him to leave, Myka knew. “Totally understood,” she said.

Helena nodded back at her. “Then let’s meet this Agent Jinks.”

Helena pushed open the door and walked towards the black SUV and the man standing next to it. “Agent Jinks,” she repeated, holding out her hand. “I’ve been told you wanted to speak to me.”

The agent shook it. “That’s true, ma’am,” he said. “That’s one hell of a base you got yourself here,” he added, looking around himself. 

“Thank you,” Helena said graciously. “Shall we sit?” She led the way to the small room Pete sometimes used when he was on standby for driving duty and pointed towards the couch in it, taking a seat in the chair opposite. “What brings you to me, agent?”

Jinks scratched his neck, looking uncomfortable. “The suit you made in Afghanistan, ma’am,” he said, “but probably not in the way you think.”

Helena raised her eyebrows, and Myka groaned inwardly. Assumptions like this were practically guaranteed to get Helena’s hackles up. “Do tell,” Helena said in a very even voice.

Jinks looked at her for a moment as if sizing her up. “The military wants it,” he said simply, then, and added, “but we’re not the military. In fact, we’re not even an agency of the US government; we’re United Nations. Part of our job is to ensure peace in the world, and that won’t happen if generals get their fingers on a suit like yours.” 

“Then what are you here for?” Helena asked with a frown. 

Jinks cast a quick glance to Myka, obviously unsure if he should go on. 

“Anything you want to tell me,” Helena said, picking up on it, “you can say in front of Ms. Bering.”

Warmth rushed through Myka at this – both gratefulness and dread at the same time. 

Jinks simply nodded. “There’s a project we’ve been working on,” he said, “and we think, based on recent observations, that you could be a valuable part of that project.” He took a small flash drive out of his pocket. “This will tell you all about it. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you not to show it to anyone else. This is more top secret than anything you’ve ever seen or heard of before.”

“You’re not going to add something terribly dramatic like ‘If you do, I’m going to have to kill you’, are you?” Helena said dryly, but Agent Steve Jinks wasn’t looking at her. 

“A former Secret Service agent like you, Ms. Bering, surely knows what I mean,” he said. 

Myka swallowed dryly. There _were_ I’m-going-to-have-to-kill-you levels of confidential, she knew, but she wasn’t sure if that was the only thing Jinks was alluding to. She could read nothing in the man’s eyes, though, so she simply nodded in reply to his question. 

Exasperated, Helena threw up her hands. “I can see that you’ve thoroughly spooked Ms. Bering, Agent Jinks, but in the meantime, I have my own projects to work on. I appreciate the visit, but I’ll trust _you_ not to abuse the knowledge _you_ gained today either – are we clear about that?”

“Absolutely clear,” Jinks replied. “I realize you have no real reason to yet, but you can trust us.”

Helena rolled her eyes in reply.

After he’d gone and they were back in the workshop, Helena uncaringly tossed the flash drive onto one of her tables and then turned back to the suits. 

“Now we know that they fly, we need to test their time travel capabilities,” she announced.

“Tomorrow,” Myka said firmly. It was late. Darkness had fallen hours ago. And she was finally breathing more freely, now that Jinks had gone without mentioning the three – or however many there had been that _he_ was aware of – incidents. 

“Tomorrow!” Helena protested. “But-”

“Neither of us had dinner tonight,” Myka reminded her. “I won’t have it said that on the _one_ day I’ve been here all day, I’ve messed up our tradition of having dinner like normal people, take a walk, do something else than work.”

“But-” Helena began again, pointing to the suits. 

Myka stepped into the way and grasped Helena’s hand. “No,” she said firmly. “I mean, seriously, it’s time travel. Does it matter if the journey starts a day later or a day sooner?” She shook her head, turned, and pulled Helena with her. “Dinner,” she threw across her shoulder. “Dinner, and then I’ll head home.” Anything else, including discussions of vigilantism, could wait until tomorrow.

“Home!” Again, Helena sounded upset. “Myka, please-” she tugged at Myka’s hand, bringing both of them to a stop in the middle of the hallway to the kitchen. When Myka turned to her, she could see that Helena’s cheeks were flushed; two red spots high up on the white. “Please, would you-” Helena broke off, cleared her throat – her words had come out a bit squeaky, Myka had to give her that – and repeated, “Would you consider staying?” And then, as if realizing all the many ways her words could be interpreted, she added, “So that we can start early tomorrow? If you’re willing?”

Myka blinked. She hadn’t been sure what Helena’s invitation had been about, but _that_ had not been it, what with Helena’s reputation for flirtations – and more. “Uh…” she hedged, mentally going through a list of pros and cons, starting with ‘no toothbrush, no PJs, no spare clothes for tomorrow’.

“I do have spare toiletries in the guest bathrooms,” Helena said as if she’d read Myka’s mind, “and I’m sure my clothes will fit you, if you don’t mind sharing.” The look she gave Myka was so imploring that Myka had to laugh. 

“Alright, Wells,” she said, and turned to lead them towards the kitchen again, “you got yourself a sleepover.” _Wait until tomorrow,_ she told herself. _Helena’s been pushed already tonight, don’t compound that._


	10. Chapter 10

During their impromptu kitchen counter dinner, Myka had to explain sleepovers and everything they signified. 

“I never really had them,” she added at the end, gesturing with the remains of her sandwich. “It was Tracy – my sister – who’d be invited, not me. I was the dork; she was the popular one.”

“‘Dork’?” Helena let her sandwich sink down and tilted her head in confusion. 

“The weirdo,” Myka explained with a sigh. “The girl with the glasses who knows everything about everything and tutors the quarterbacks so they scrape by and don’t flunk out and can go on playing football. That’s about all she’s good for if you ask a sixteen-year-old.” She rolled her eyes. 

“I fail to see in which way ‘knowing everything about everything’ is a bad thing,” Helena muttered, frowning darkly. “If your peers did not see your worth, Myka, I most certainly do.”

Myka grinned at her. “These days, I do too, believe it or not; but in high school? Nope.” She tried to ignore the warm rush that Helena’s comment had woken – if this sleepover was going to work at all, any thoughts of warm rushes or wanting to kiss a certain someone needed to be buried deep. For all her flirtatious ways with practically everyone else, Helena had never made any such advances on Myka. 

“I do not want to get any of this wrong, or step on your toes, Myka,” Helena said as they walked away from the kitchen to a part of the house Myka hadn’t been in before. “Therefore I’d like to ask you this: my bedroom is over here,” she stopped and pointed to the left, “and there are two guest bedrooms down that corridor.” She pointed straight. “From your description, I gather that having a ‘sleepover’ implies sharing a bedroom, however you also spoke of it as a children’s or teenagers’ endeavor, and I am not sure if the same rules apply for adults.”

Myka laughed and flushed at the same time. “Uh, either is fine with me,” she said, then bit her tongue. Was it? Really? Was it _really_ going to be ‘fine’ to share a bedroom with a woman she wanted at the same time to kiss and to interrogate? A woman who’d once been photographed in a stretch limousine with not one, but two movie stars, of different genders, in various states of undress? A woman who had _also_ been photographed stopping not one but three crimes in process while wearing an armored suit (that was exhilarating to fly)? A woman whose so very British pronunciation of ‘such atrocities’ still echoed in Myka’s ears?

“Aces!” Helena, oblivious to Myka’s thought processes, beamed and headed towards her bedroom. 

As she led Myka through its door, Myka stopped and stared. There was only one bed in it. 

_Of course there’s only one bed in it,_ Myka told herself in exasperation. _Why on Earth would there be a guest bed in a master bedroom?!_ And then she wondered if Helena had ever brought any of her conquests here – but no, she couldn’t have, could she? Neither Pete nor Leena had ever said anything along those lines, but then again, they probably wouldn’t. Integrity, and all that. But Pete _had_ said that he’d always wanted to show off the access doors to someone, and that didn’t make sense if he’d brought other people through before. 

While Myka was reasoning thusly, Helena was puttering around the room, pulling pajamas from this cupboard and towels from that, and finally opening a door that led to an en-suite bathroom. “Would you like to go first?” she asked, standing next to the door a little awkwardly. 

“Hm?” Myka asked, surprised to be suddenly addressed. “Oh! Um, sure, yeah.”

Helena then gave a little start. “Oh, I completely forgot – toiletries. Why don’t you change while I head over to the guest bathrooms and collect them?”

“Sure,” Myka repeated, feeling on somewhat firmer ground with Helena so flustered. _She can’t have brought anyone here before if she’s so unprepared,_ she told herself as she headed towards the bathroom and Helena headed towards the door. For some reason, the thought reassured her.

A few minutes later, Myka was in silken pajamas that felt more luxurious than anything she’d ever worn. She opened the bathroom door self-consciously – not only did she feel preposterous wearing anything as grand as silk PJs, but they were too short in both the arms and the legs, and uncomfortably tight around the shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she said, halting in the doorway. She started to raise an arm to rub the back of her neck, then stopped short when, at the same time, her muscles protested and the shirt’s shoulder seam creaked.

Helena looked around from where she was sitting on the bed. She opened her mouth as if to protest, then put her head on one side, taking Myka in with disconcerting scrutiny. “Ah,” she said finally, “alas. I was afraid my nightclothes would be a tad too small.”

 _You said you were sure_ , Myka didn’t say. _Stop looking at me like… like that_ , she also didn’t say. “Don’t you have, like, an old t-shirt or something?” she asked instead, fighting the blush that threatened. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, these feel amazing.” She spread her arms very slightly and very gingerly and looked down at herself. “But I’m afraid to lift my arms any higher, and I don’t even want to think about getting a toothbrush up to my mouth.” Her ears were hot, and she could feel the blush spreading to her cheeks. “I really don’t want to tear a seam or, or, or get a stain on them or anything.”

Helena nodded. “I see,” she said, and got up to head to her closet. “Old t-shirt, old t-shirt, old t-shirt,” she muttered as she went through its contents. After a few moments, she turned back to Myka with an exasperated huff. “I’m afraid there really is nothing in here that fits that description, or that would fit you better than what you’re wearing.” Then her face brightened. She headed back towards her bed and pushed a button on a console. “Mister Lattimer,” she called into what Myka now realized, with horror and a complete inability to stop what was happening, was an intercom, “I have need of one of your t-shirts. Nothing fancy, something comfortable will do perfectly.” Then, turning back to Myka but, and Myka was very, very aware of that, _not_ ending the call, Helena said, “That would work, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” Myka brought out. Pete would never ever let her hear the end of this. She could already see the finger quotes he’d lovingly wrap around the word ‘sleepover’ whenever he’d speak of this. Myka had no idea what Pete’s reply to Helena’s request was, but a few minutes later there was a knock on the door.

As Helena opened the door, she held up a hand, one finger outstretched. “Not a single word out of you, Mister Lattimer,” she said, and reached out with her other hand to receive the requested item. “Thank you.” And the door was shut in his face. 

Myka exhaled deeply, realizing as she did so that ever since Helena had spoken to Pete, she hadn’t really taken all that many breaths at all, much less deep ones. “Thank you,” she said, trying very hard not to imagine what Pete must be thinking right now. Then, as Helena wordlessly held out the shirt to her, Myka repeated herself as she grabbed it and fled towards the bathroom. 

_Look at it this way,_ she told herself as she changed into the North Canton Wrestling shirt that, thankfully, was freshly washed and pressed – she hadn’t really trusted Pete Lattimer to not appear at the door with the shirt he’d worn for his evening workout session – _what would a sleepover be without a few moments of mortification? I mean at least she cares that this is awkward, otherwise she wouldn’t have told Pete to shut up. Right? I mean… right?  
_  
There was a knock on the bathroom door.

Myka stopped with her arms above her and the t-shirt halfway down her shoulders. _God, now what?!_ “A moment,” she shouted, louder than she’d anticipated. 

“Your toiletries,” Helena’s voice came through the door. 

Myka cursed inwardly as she struggled into the t-shirt that, somehow, against all reason, seemed to have fewer armholes than it should have. Her shoulders ached. Her ribs ached. Her whole body ached, in fact, and here she had to change twice. When the t-shirt finally sat on her the way a t-shirt should, she opened the door, slightly out of breath, grabbed the proffered… basket, and shut the door again.

A basket! She shook her head as she looked at the thing. A small wicker hamper with an array of equally small tubes of facial cleanser, moisturizing cream, toothpaste, a toothbrush, and all the other things a person might need in the bathroom, neatly arranged on white cloth lining. If she hadn’t known before that Helena was rolling in money, this really drove it home. This was a thing of high-class hotels, for crying out loud, not for any private person to have in their guestroom’s bathroom – but then any private person that Myka knew didn’t have guestrooms with their own bathrooms, either. Or a secret lair where they were building two mobile time machines that could shoot fireballs from their palms. Well, one of them, anyway.

In a way, she’d known ever since she’d applied for the job as Helena’s PA that Helena was… rich. The richest woman in the world, as a matter of fact. Genius, billionaire, philanthropist, philanderer – she’d heard Helena describe herself that way to reporters before, and all of it was true. And then you spent time with the woman and didn’t think about any of those until something happened that drove it home. Like building a fusion reactor, or toiletry baskets. Or A thwarted robbery in Santa Monica. 

Should ‘vigilante’ be added to Helena’s list of self-descriptors? 

Myka stared at herself in the mirror. What the _hell_ had she gotten herself into? She’d applied for the PA position on little more than a whim, then she’d been fascinated by her boss, then she’d developed a crush on her boss, then her boss had become ‘Helena’, then Helena had been abducted and returned with a miniature reactor in her chest, then she’d made Myka CEO instead of her, and now she was the literal H.G. Wells from the nineteenth century who was building not just one but two time machines to save her daughter who’d died in the past, who was testing these suits’ flight capabilities by stopping crime, and who was currently asking Myka for help testing their time traveling capabilities. And hosting Myka for a sleepover. So that testing could begin early tomorrow, Myka reminded herself; that was the only reason. 

Or was it? What about the comments about Myka’s worth earlier? Or the one about her hair being a glorious mess, back when Helena taken Myka out on the boat? But then Helena had flinched away from Myka, had clammed up completely. And there was still the matter of what she’d done to the murderers of her daughter that Myka had a hard time coming to terms with – not that she couldn’t see Helena be ruthless or aggressive; she’d seen that from her before. But that she’d break the law? _She’s suggesting to break the laws of physics,_ Myka reminded herself with a helpless little laugh. _What’s a country’s legal code compared to that? Did a statute of limitations exist back then for whatever she did, and has it run out or…_

Again, Myka shook her head, watching her mirrored self do the same. _Stop it,_ she told herself. _You don’t have all the facts yet. Stay with her, learn more, be the voice of reason._ She frowned when she noticed the cut high on her forehead that had bled onto the suit glove earlier. A bruise was already forming around it, and she wondered how she’d explain that to Artie when she met him on Monday. What she needed, she decided, was time to process all of this. Time to make up her mind how she felt about all of this, time to learn more about what Helena was doing and why. 

Time to figure out, on top of all of the rest, what she, Myka Bering, wanted out of all of this. As things stood now, she wasn’t too sure if she wanted to be CEO of the world’s largest company. She liked the challenge, and she sure liked the paycheck – if she wanted a house with guest bedrooms which had their own bathrooms and their own little wicker baskets, she could go for it in a couple of months, maybe a year, considering Los Angeles real estate pricing. She liked the power the position gave her, too, the way doors opened for her in Washington, even if the committee hearing that those doors had led to hadn’t been the most pleasant thing that had ever happened to her. She still needed to hire a PA of her own, and fast – but all things considered, even the downsides, it was exhilarating to sit in that chair. 

But it had only happened because of whatever had happened to Helena in Afghanistan, and because of what had happened over a hundred years ago. Something that had driven Helena to lengths that sounded fantastic, fabricated, straight out of a science fiction story – grief. A murdered child. The inability to prevent said murder, to put it right somehow. Over a hundred years of being cut off from everything but your own thoughts. Could a person go through something like this and remain sane? Was all of this just a pipe dream? Okay, the suits actually did fly and that was… not something the world had seen before, just like fusion power. _That_ was an undisputable fact, even if Myka had only an old, grainy newspaper photo and Helena’s word for the rest. H.G. Wells a woman, a genius-level inventor, the intellect behind all the inventions and patents that had laid the groundwork for Wells Industries. And now this genius-level inventor wanted to break the laws of physics – at least as far as Myka understood them. And Myka wanted to believe that Helena could do it-

But what would happen if she couldn’t?

There was another knock on the door. “Myka, are you alright?” 

Myka blinked. How long had she been staring at herself in the mirror? “Uh, yeah, I’m fine,” she answered. “Give me a few minutes, okay?”

“Of course,” Helena replied at once. “Take however much time you need.”

Ten minutes, it turned out, were enough to wash her face, brush her teeth, floss, and moisturize. “All done,” Myka announced as she left the bathroom and gestured towards it with as much awkwardness as Helena had shown when she’d done the same thing earlier. At least she _could_ gesture now, what with Pete’s t-shirt and all. “All yours.”

“Thank you,” Helena replied and got up. “Make yourself at home, will you? There’s even a book on the bed table for you.” 

And just like that, the reality that she’d be sleeping in the same bed as Helena came crashing back into Myka’s thoughts. What did Myka want out of all of this in terms of what might or might not happen between her and Helena? She barely realized Helena slipping by her into the bathroom as she stared at the bed. It was a large bed. Easily king sized, maybe even larger. A lot could happen in this bed – Myka banished that thought with a firm shake of her head. No. The voice of reason didn’t… fraternize. Get intimate. Again, Myka shook her head – ‘have sex with’, that’s what a voice of reason didn’t. Intimacy could take a lot of forms. Helena wanted a friend. Helena was still grieving in some way, and had been for well over a century. Myka was pretty sure that the whole suits thing was part of that grieving process. And if Helena opened up to Myka amidst the, yes, intimacy of a sleepover in a shared bed, that could only help, couldn’t it?

Myka took a step further towards the bed. Two nightstands, two lamps; one lit, the other – with a book underneath it – dark. That was obviously the side of the bed Helena intended for Myka. Myka slowly made her way there, mesmerized by how the light of Helena’s bedside lamp shone on the sheets. When she reached out to touch them, her hunch was confirmed – silk, too. Just like Myka’s PJ bottoms. But not her shirt, plain old cotton with an Ohio college print. Myka almost laughed out loud. God, this was all too much. Really, seriously too much. 

Gingerly, she turned down the sheets and sat down on the bed, then turned on her light and reached for the book Helena had set out for her. This time, she did laugh out loud – Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Second Sex’. “Nothing like a bit of light reading before bed,” Myka murmured under her breath and put the book down again. She’d read it in college, had liked it well enough, but it’d been somewhat outdated even then – and then she realized. 

“This is all new to you,” she said when Helena came out of the bathroom, in a very demure half-sleeved (but still silken) pajama that, of course, fitted her perfectly and that, of course, showed the glow of the micro reactor embedded in Helena’s chest. Usually Helena wore clothes that muted the reactor’s glow at least a little, but a silk pajama’s sheerness – Myka dismissed that thought, difficult though it was, and held up the book. “Feminist theory,” she elaborated. 

“Oh! Yes. Fascinating reading,” Helena replied with a nod. “Such a lot to catch up on – history as well. Two World Wars!” she exclaimed with a frustrated gesture. “The first one was brewing even before I stepped into my machine, but I could have never envisioned its scope nor its sheer brutality. My only consolation is that apparently no one could, and yet it still wasn’t the war to end all wars.” She shook her head darkly as she walked towards the bed. “And then I found out that my inventions, my patents, had been used for a lot of weaponry and associated technology.” She gestured around the room. “What you see here, what you saw in the workshop – blood stains all of it. The blood of generations.”

Myka nodded, ready to say that she understood – but then the full implications hit and her mouth dropped open. “You’re H.G. Wells,” she said, and it came out in a squeak. “I mean,” she added quickly, because Helena had been giving her an almost sympathetic smile, “I mean you were a pacifist over a hundred years ago. You envisioned a better world for people.”

“I _worked towards_ a better world for people,” Helena corrected her bitterly. “All the things I invented, the materials I researched – I wanted them to make _life_ easier for people, not killing each other.” Her mouth was turned sharply downwards. Then she inhaled deeply. “I apologize,” she said, sitting down on her side of the bed and turning towards Myka. “If I had wanted to extemporize on the sad state of humanity in general, I would have set a different book on your cabinet. As it is, the state of feminism is in better shape, if only slightly – it seems that for every step forward we take, we take at least one step back, do we not? That is what I would much rather discuss with you.”

Myka hesitated. “That’s a pretty heavy discussion to have right before bedtime,” she said tentatively. 

Helena shrugged once. “That may be so,” she said, “and from what you’ve described, it is not exactly in character for a sleepover, is it? However, I thought it would be demeaning for your intellect, much less out of character for both of us, to talk about movie stars or – boy groups, was it not?”

Helena’s distaste rode on the words ‘boy groups’ so clearly that Myka had to laugh. “Yeah, no, that’s not us,” she agreed. “There’s gotta be something between celebrities on this end of the scale and Simone de Beauvoir on the other, though.”

“Well,” Helena said, “you’re more of an expert on sleepovers than I am. What else do people do?”

“Play games,” Myka suggested, “like, Tracy used to love to have sleepovers at one of her friend’s place because those friend’s parents had a pool table in the basement. Or have junk food – but we already had dinner. Or watch a movie or a TV show. Or just talk, I guess.” She deliberately stayed away from Tracy’s favorite sleepover activity, Truth or Dare, because there was no way, simply _no_ way, that she’d get into that with Helena G. Wells. 

“We could watch a movie, I suppose,” Helena replied pensively. “But we’re already here; I don’t want to get up and head to the living room again.”

“You don’t ha- no you don’t, do you,” Myka said. “Have a TV in here, I mean.”

“Oh good grief no,” Helena replied. “Everything in its proper place – the bedroom is for sleeping, or for other kinds of… entertainment.”

“Except during sleepovers,” Myka said, staunchly ignoring the ‘other significant-pause entertainment’. “Or we could have the sleepover in the living room, bring the sheets and pillows and camp out on the couches. I’d even let you have the longer one,” she added gallantly. 

“Nonsense,” Helena gave back. “You are two inches taller than I; there is no reason why you should sleep on a shorter couch when there’s a perfectly suitable bed right here.” She patted the sheets. 

“All the more reason to install a TV in here,” Myka told her. When Helena huffed in mock annoyance, she grinned. “Alright then, let’s just talk,” she said. “But not about boy groups.”

“We could both tell each other something about ourselves,” Helena suggested. “I did reveal something very intimate yesterday; you could return the favor by telling me something equally personal so that we’re even.”

Myka raised her eyebrows. It made the cut on her forehead pull uncomfortably, but she ignored it. “You did tell me that of your own free will,” she said with a slight little smile. She didn’t want to discourage the conversation turning to this, but she also didn’t want to appear too eager. _Slow and steady wins the race._ If this even was a race. Myka carefully refrained from thinking too hard about what the goal of that race might be. 

Again, Helena huffed. “What a very government agent reply,” she said, and got between the sheets, pulling them up high on her chest. Then she motioned, quite imperiously, for Myka to do the same. “I will admit that I am feeling nervous about you knowing my true identity. What do you think of it? What do you think of me, now that you know?” Her expression was… as anxious as Myka had ever seen it, and that was saying something.

Still, Myka’s mouth went dry. _So much for taking things slow._ To cover, she lay down on her side of the bed, taking great care to keep her elbows and knees tucked in. _Remember, she’s asking about being H.G. Wells, not about being Iron Woman. Unless she brings it up, wait with that one._ Finally, she replied, “I guess some things I was wondering about make more sense now, like your turns of phrase. Sometimes, they sounded really old-fashioned, and I thought maybe it was what people sound like when they’ve gone to upper-class private schools in England. I had an instructor in the Secret Service who claimed she could tell if someone’d gone to Harvard or Yale just by the way they talked, so,” she shrugged, “that’s what I figured.”

“Interesting,” Helena replied slowly. “I do realize, of course, that language usage has changed, but I wouldn’t have thought it would stand out this much.”

“Maybe it was just because what with you having a non-American accent, I was really listening for anything odd about how you speak,” Myka said with another shrug. She didn’t want to make Helena feel self-conscious about the way she spoke – she _liked_ how Helena spoke, old-fashioned turns of phrase and everything. “I’ve never heard anyone else commenting on it,” she added, hoping that that would help.

“I see,” Helena said, which didn’t reassure Myka at all. “That can’t have been the whole extent of your thoughts on the matter, though, can it?”

For a moment, Myka thought that this was Helena’s usual coy way of angling, of flirting even. But Helena’s eyes were still showing her nerves, still completely unguarded. That deserved to be honored by an honest, even reassuring reply. She propped herself up on an elbow, suppressed a wince at how her shoulder protested the movement, and turned to face Helena. “No, it’s not,” she said quietly. “It’s a lot more complex than that, and to be honest, I’m working my way through it still.”

“You did say you had to process it,” Helena nodded, turning towards Myka as well. 

“M-hm,” Myka agreed. “I mean really, it’s a lot. Even to learn that you went through all of… you know, what happened in Afghanistan, what happened to your kid. But… I mean, H.G. Wells, as you know,” she rolled her eyes, remembering that job interview that seemed so long ago (had it really only been three months?), “is my favorite author. My dad read me those books when I was a kid; I read them myself once I was able, saved up my money to buy as many of them as I could. And now I learn that not only is he the forward-thinking, feminist, pacifist author I’ve known him to be, but he’s also not a he at all and not dead at all and…” she bit off her next words, trying to find ones that wouldn’t give anything away she didn’t want to. “And my ex-boss,” she finished. 

Helena, who’d leaned into Myka’s words expectantly, seemed to deflate at the last addition. “I suppose so,” she said with almost a pout. 

“And a friend,” Myka added quickly. 

Helena laid back down and looked at the ceiling. “I’m afraid you’ve been more of a friend to me than I to you,” she said quietly. “You kept coming here, kept pulling me out of my thoughts.” She turned her head to look at Myka again. “And I never even asked what made you leave Washington, for example.”

Myka had to look away from the empathy offered in Helena’s gaze. She cleared her throat. “That could also be you respecting my decision not to talk about it,” she said, trying to soften her words with the tone of her voice. 

“You lost someone, too, didn’t you.”

Myka kept staring at the sheets. Her jaw worked. She didn’t want to reply to Helena’s non-question. _So much for intimacy and opening up,_ part of herself groused.

“I’m sorry, Myka,” she heard, and then she could see Helena’s arm move from under the sheets, towards her. A moment later, she felt Helena’s hand touch her shoulder hesitantly. “I’ll stop prying.” When Myka didn’t, couldn’t react, Helena’s hand was withdrawn. “I’ll change the topic, shall I? Hm… ah – how was it to grow up in a bookstore?”

Myka couldn’t help it – she barked a bitter laugh. Even from the corners of her eyes, she could see Helena flinch. She shut her eyes and shook her head. “Sorry,” she said, “but that’s like the next-worst topic you could have chosen. I know there’s no way you could’ve known, but… well, it wasn’t all that nice.”

Helena kept silent for a long time. Then Myka saw her shift, and then she felt a touch again, this time on her upper arm. “Myka, I’m truly sorry,” was what Helena offered.

It sounded sincere, and warm, and like a true friend’s reply. Myka laid back on her back, let her head fall to the side and opened her eyes to look at Helena. “Thanks,” she said, just as simply. She sighed, gritted her teeth, and closed her eyes again. “It was called Bering and Sons,” she said. “It was my father’s store, and all the children he had were my sister and me. That’s about all you need to know about it.”

Helena’s hand tightened on Myka’s arm. “Oh that is just reprehensible,” she said fervently. 

Myka huffed a laugh. “Yeah.” Then something occurred to her that she hadn’t thought of before. “I wonder what he thinks of me, now that I am heading the world’s largest company,” she said. “I called my mom when it happened; I didn’t want her to hear it on the news instead of directly from me – I’d never hear the end of it. But I never… I never thought about what _his_ reaction would be.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes behind her lids, opening them when she was done to glare at the ceiling. “I never could do anything right in his eyes,” she said, “so I guess he’s just waiting for me to mess this up, just like MacPherson and all the other… _men_ out there.”

Helena made a disgusted noise at the back of her throat. “Some things really haven’t changed since my time,” she said. “And here I’d hoped that a hundred years would have seen _man_ kind rise above this kind of thing.”

“The worst thing are those women who buy into it,” Myka added, “you know the ones. Who tell you with a happy smile that a woman’s place really is in the kitchen.”

“Good heavens yes,” Helena agreed. 

“I mean there’s been some progress,” Myka went on, trying to be fair to the twenty-first century. “When my mom was my age, she couldn’t open a bank account on her own. But still, sometimes I could just scream.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

“I have no idea how frustrating this must be for you,” Myka said. 

“Oh, I can assure you there has been considerable progress and I see it,” Helena replied. “But yes,” she conceded, “sometimes I feel like railing at the skies, too.”

They both lay in silence for a while. Then Myka asked, “Was it… how awful was it, to be locked inside your mind for a century?”

There was more silence, and Myka was about to apologize and change the topic like Helena had done when Helena answered, “Very. Very, very awful.”

“I’m sorry.” For a moment, Myka thought about putting her hand on Helena’s arm – but Helena’s hand was still firmly, warmly, ensconced on Myka’s arm. It would have been awkward to maneuver around it, and it might have caused Helena to pull away. And that was the last thing Myka wanted. 

With a sigh, Helena went on, “I told myself that time _must_ be passing, that my machine was programmed to bring me out of my suspended state after a hundred years precisely – but part of me was wondering if it had worked; if I even was in that suspended state, or if this was death – floating around as an incorporeal spirit for the rest of eternity. I had no way of telling how much time had passed, or if indeed time was passing at all, nor even if I was still in this world. It felt like a different… realm of existence at times.”

Myka tried to imagine it and shuddered. “I would’ve gone insane,” she said quietly. Yet Helena seemed clear-headed enough – but then some people had tremendous compartmentalization skills, Myka told herself dryly. 

“I’m sure there were times when I was, if not on the brink of insanity, then a good bit beyond that threshold.”

Myka rolled to her side to face Helena. It made Helena withdraw her hand, and Myka missed that touch immediately, but it did give Myka the opportunity to return the favor of a friendly gesture. She squeezed Helena’s shoulder. “You made it through, though,” she said. 

Helena huffed and closed her eyes. “Sometimes I’m not so sure of that. James MacPherson would, for certain, try to have me committed if he ever found out.”

Myka was silent for a moment. There were a few responses waiting on the tip of her tongue, ranging from badmouthing James MacPherson to quipping about the truism that the spark of genius and the spark of insanity were related, but none of them seemed right. “You don’t seem crazy to me,” is what she finally decided to say.

Again, Helena huffed, and it sounded even darker this time. “That,” she said, “hinges on how you define ‘crazy’. If Charles hadn’t been the good person that he was, he could have not just tried, but succeeded in getting me committed several times over, simply for thinking independently, or for being a ‘sexual deviant’, or for having a child out of wedlock.”

Myka gave a little start at that. It was true, Helena had never even mentioned a husband, had never talked about Christina’s father in any way. She didn’t ask, though. If Helena hadn’t mentioned him by now, he probably wasn’t worth mentioning – or thinking about him hurt too much for some reason.

As if she’d read Myka’s thoughts, Helena said, “I appreciate you not asking about him. I’m sure you’re curious, and some other day I’ll tell you about him, but I’d kindly ask that day be not today.”

“Sure,” Myka said immediately. “No problem.”

“See, this is something I like about this age,” Helena said, turning over to Myka and raising herself slightly on her elbow. “There are more people who won’t judge. This kind of acceptance was exceedingly rare back in the nineteenth century. Caturanga, the man after whom my AI is named, was one such person, and I treasured it – I credit it with a large part of my continued sanity, in fact. He taught me since I was a teenager, introduced me to the scientific method, shaped my thinking and my work, and most of all, he never made me feel odd or wrong for wanting to know, for wanting to probe, tinker and create.” Helena paused for a moment, her eyes far away. “It took me longer than I feel comfortable admitting to realize that he, just as much as I, was an outcast. He was of Indian heritage, even though he had lived his entire live in England, even though hearing him speak, you would have pictured the most proper of Victorian gentlemen. He tried to be accepted into universities, scientific societies or even circles, yet for all he had to offer them, none would take him.”

“Their loss,” Myka muttered darkly. It was a story she had heard before – not for herself, but from the Latinx and black kids in school who ended up not going to the same middle school or high school or college, who ended up beating themselves bloody against a system rigged against them, while Myka, all of twelve or sixteen or nineteen years old, had stood helplessly by, not knowing what to do. She knew better now, but she still felt the shame of her inaction. “We can change that now,” she said suddenly. “Wells Industries is such a large company; we can make changes.”

Helena met her gaze with shining eyes. “We can and we will.” Then her smile faded slightly. “Or rather, you can and will. I have my own endeavor, after all.” 

“Which we’ll test tomorrow,” Myka nodded. 

“Which we’ll test tomorrow,” Helena agreed with a renewed smile. Again, though, her face fell. “I do hope that test will go better than the ones today. Are you still in pain?” She reached up hesitantly and hovered over the cut on Myka’s forehead. 

“Truth to tell, I hadn’t even thought about it until right now,” Myka said. “I am a bit sore. I should have taken a hot shower for my muscles, or a bath.”

“You still can.”

“Says the woman who refused to leave the bed for a movie in the living room.”

“Well, both a shower and a bath are surely shorter than a movie, and the bathroom is right next door,” Helena pointed out. 

“You don’t know that.”

“The location of my own bathroom?”

“That me taking a bath would be shorter than a movie,” Myka replied. 

It made Helena laugh. “Point taken,” she said. “I shall keep it in mind henceforth.”

 _Henceforth,_ Myka thought. _Who even says henceforth anymore? H.G. Wells, that’s who._ She shook her head and chuckled. _  
_  
“Did I say something odd again?”

“Not odd,” Myka protested. “Charming.”

Helena raised her eyebrow, and Myka almost bit her tongue. However, Helena let that one pass. “So will you?” she asked instead.

“Take a bath?” When Helena nodded, Myka shook her head. “Nah,” she said, “I’m too lazy. Once I’m in bed, it takes a lot to make me leave it again. Also something you can keep in mind henceforth.” _Why did I say that?,_ she wondered. _I’m not flirting – I mean, I’m in bed with H.G. Wells; I can’t flirt with her, can I?_ She swallowed. _I’m in bed with H.G. Wells. Is that what I want out of this? It does feel… good. But… God, there’s just so much going on. But, I mean, look at her. Look at her! Her – H.G. Wells is a her!_

Helena’s eyebrow was still raised – she looked as though she was reading Myka’s every thought. “Rest assured that I will,” she said simply, and Myka stifled a groan. Helena noticed anyway. “Is this part of what you need to process?” she asked, withdrawing a little.

Myka nodded, not really trusting her voice. She cleared her throat and said, “Yeah. I… I mean… what you told me today – it, um, I… I thought I had… before, I mean, I thought I had a pretty good grip on who you are. As a person, I mean. When you came back from Afghanistan and basically disappeared into your… lab or workshop or whatever,” she gave a small, eye-rolling laugh. “Don’t get me wrong; I’m not criticizing you,” she added quickly, “that’s not what I meant. You have stuff you need to deal with, and this is your way of doing that. Some people do that from within a workshop, others move to the other end of the United States.” She shrugged with a wry smile that Helena answered with an understanding nod. “What I mean is that even then I didn’t know if…” she pointed hesitantly to Helena’s chest and the reactor embedded in it, “if this changed you, and if yes, how it changed you. How I’d need to… how I might still be a friend for you after something like that. And while I thought I had that down right up until yesterday, now I feel like I need to figure out yet another way of being a friend to you.” 

“But you don’t!” Helena said imploringly. “Myka, please, you-” she stopped and raised herself on her elbow again, gazing down on Myka intently. “There is nothing you need to change at all. Please.” There was a slight crease between her eyebrows as she collected her thoughts before going on, “You cannot imagine what it felt like to have you come into my office that day. All week I’d been surrounded by men. Department heads, lawyers, doctors, you name it – all men, doubting my claim, challenging my position, posturing and jockeying to improve theirs. A hundred years had passed and it seemed that nothing had changed. Oh, there were women, even working women, but as what, I ask you? Secretaries,” she answered her own question. “Subordinates. Deputies at most, supplementary at best, ignored, talked-over, and soon forgotten. And then in you strode, riding in on your college education, pre-med, pre-law, Secret Service expertise like a knight on a charger, and you didn’t even realize how exceptional you were. You carried your capabilities as though you weren’t even aware they were there, wrapped around your shoulders. You, more than any book on recent history, drove home that women’s prospects had changed indeed, that it wasn’t just possible for someone like you to exist, but commonplace-”

“Let me stop you right there,” Myka said, cheeks flaming with embarrassment. “I mean, I get how you arrive at this, I really do, but…” She could see the faces again, of her school friends, the ones who didn’t get to go to college, much less the secret service. A lot of those faces had been female. “It’s still not easy for women to get where I’ve gone,” she said. “It’s still a very privileged career, you see? Yeah, I’ve worked hard, but I’ve also been lucky. White, middle-class, a family that values education – none of this is necessarily commonplace, you gotta understand that.”

“I know, I know,” Helena replied immediately. “If I hadn’t been sensitive to it through Caturanga, Leena would have soon set me straight on the matter.” She smiled. “And yet. Here was Miss, no, Ms. Bering,” her eyes gained an amused gleam as she recalled the moment, “with the world at her fingertips, asking to work for me. I was enchanted, Ms. Bering. Enthralled, and have remained so.” 

Myka’s mouth went dry. “I…” she said helplessly.

“Oh dear.” Helena moved slightly back. “I did not mean to embarrass you.”

“I’m not…” Myka protested, and her voice was half a register higher than usual. She cleared her throat. “I wouldn’t call it ‘embarrassed’,” she said finally. “I, uh…” she debated for a bit, and then decided to go for it. “I need to make sure we… we’re on the same page, okay? Maybe this is one of these things, you know, cross-cultural misunderstanding across time and space or whatever.”

Helena tilted her head, causing her hair to slide across her shoulder and into her pajama’s admittedly modest cleavage. “I’m intrigued,” she said. 

Myka swallowed dryly, trying to ignore where Helena’s hair wanted to pull her eyes. “I… you… you said you want a friend, but sometimes it feels to me… I’m getting mixed messages, if you know what I mean.”

“Are you asking me if, in fact, I am flirting with you?”

Myka resisted the urge to groan. Helena had no right, none at all, to be so unflustered. “I guess I am,” she said, and was proud at how level it came out.

Helena was silent for a moment. It made a million thoughts run havoc through Myka’s mind, each trying to shout down the others. Then Helena smiled – a small thing, that smile was; slightly sad, slightly nervous, completely unguarded. “I guess I am,” she said too, and added, “flirting with you.” And where, in any other circumstance – or maybe, towards any other person – her tone might have been playful, even cocky, here and now it was, like her smile, slightly nervous, and completely vulnerable. Helena cast her eyes downwards and bit the inside of her lip. “I must admit,” she said, “that the more I came to know you, the more I was attracted to you. Not as someone to conquer, but as…” her voice dropped away. Myka could clearly see her jaws work for a moment. “But you were working for me,” Helena went on with a sigh. “It wasn’t appropriate – not because of some outdated Victorian sensitivities, but because of the power imbalance. And because of what I found myself wanting – not a quick dalliance, heavens no. I…” Again, Helena stopped. Again, Myka could see the muscles in her jaw contract, relax, contract. Helena might have sounded unflustered before, but she clearly was affected by this. And somehow that helped Myka calm down. Helena swallowed, then continued, “I wanted to – I still want to,” she amended quickly, “have you in my life, Myka, in whichever form you will consent to it.” Her eyes flickered upwards for the briefest of moments, barely lingering on Myka’s before dropping to the sheets again. “I did not know what to make of that wish when I first realized it,” she said with a helpless little laugh. “I almost didn’t recognize it for what it was, and by the time I did, it was too late – I had fallen for you, for the woman who knew everything about everything, except, of course, comic books. But I had a different plan, a different goal that I was already pursuing, and for that, you – and my feelings for you,” and at that, she finally looked up at Myka fully, “were a distraction.”

Myka blinked. “You…” She tried to wrap her mind around what she was hearing. The word that clanged most in her mind, though, was the last one she’d heard. “A distraction?”

Helena pressed her lips together and dropped her gaze again. “I’m afraid that came out badly,” she said quietly. “I… Myka, you must understand,” she continued, and now her eyes met Myka’s with a burning intensity, “that nothing in the world is as important to me as finding a way to rescue my daughter. Nothing.”

Myka swallowed dryly. She did understand the impulse, but she was nowhere near convinced that Helena had even so much as a shot at this. Should she tell Helena so, though? What would that do to Helena’s psyche, though, to know that Myka doubted the possibility of achieving what was more important to her than anything in the world?

She had hesitated too long. Helena’s eyes filled with anxiety, and she reached out a hand towards Myka that stopped just short of making contact with her shoulder. “Myka, please,” she repeated, “you _must_ understand.”

“I do,” Myka said quickly. “I’m sorry, it’s just… I mean, time travel!” She tried to laugh, but it sounded off, and she shook her head to get rid of the sound. “Please don’t get me wrong, I absolutely get how important this is to you, one hundred percent. You lost your child. Of course you want to do anything that’s in your power to make that not have happened.” Again, she had to swallow – Sam’s face rose in her mind, the way he’d looked so peaceful and so very far away in his open casket. She’d have done anything, too, _anything_ within her power, to bring him back. To make his eyes open again, make his cheeks flood with color. “I understand,” she repeated intently. 

Helena nodded. “But you’re not quite certain I’ll be successful,” she said. Shrugging, she went on, even as Myka drew breath to – what? Protest? It wasn’t as if Helena was wrong – “No matter. We shall see tomorrow if I was right or you were, after all. I can live with you doubting me for that long.” She leaned forward, and suddenly Myka found it difficult to breathe. “Until then,” she said in a low voice, “I would… have time for a distraction.”

Again, Myka hesitated. This was moving so fast, she hadn’t even begun to properly process, but here was Helena G. Wells, the _actual, female!,_ H.G. Wells, and she was… propositioning Myka? 

Again, Helena’s eyes filled with sudden dread over Myka’s hesitation. “Oh dear,” she said, and the two red spots appeared on her cheeks again. “Have I misjudged? Are you- oh, I’m so dreadfully sorry.” She drew back, physically putting space between herself and Myka.

“No!” Myka exclaimed and reached forwards on instinct. Her hand collided with Helena’s shoulder, grasped it, held on. “I’m… I’m sorry,” she said. “I swear I’m not… you haven’t… um, misjudged.” She knew she was blushing furiously, and her only saving grace was that Helena was, too. “At all,” she added, and cleared her throat. 

A smile rose on Helena’s face like the sun coming up. Myka had seen a lot of facial expressions on the other woman in the past three months, but never such an expression of sheer joy.

Because of her, of Myka Bering the dork. 

Because of what she’d just said. 

Helena – all that she was, and Myka still was nowhere near done wrapping her mind around that – Helena was smiling, like _this_ , because of Myka’s words. 

Myka realized she was beaming, too. 

Helena cleared her throat, as delicately as the tiny crease of deliberation that had just appeared between her eyebrows. “Another thing that I very much appreciate about this day and age,” she said, and just as Myka had never seen such an expression, she’d never heard such a tone of voice from Helena before, “is how focused it is on consent between partners.” She leaned forwards again, hand still buried in her dark hair propping up her head. “I would very much like to kiss you, if you are willing.”

“Yes.” Helena had barely finished speaking before Myka gave her reply. Now it was her turn to clear her throat. “Yes, please,” she repeated, sounding – feeling – quite out of breath. 

And if she felt breathless then, it was nothing compared to how she felt when she leaned forwards to bridge the distance and Helena’s lips met hers. 

The kiss was slow, gentle like the sigh that escaped Helena’s lips after a second. Myka felt as though she was dreaming – Helena’s skin was so soft, her lips so supple, her _hair_ \- 

She had dreamed of running her fingers through Helena’s hair, and now she was doing exactly that. She had dreamed of kissing Helena, and now she was doing exactly that. 

Neither of them was pushing forwards further, neither figuratively nor in actual physical movement. Their bodies were still a few inches apart, propped on their sides on the bed, touching only lips to lips and fingertips to hair, cheeks, jaws. Myka could still smell the slight scent of metal and pencil on Helena’s fingers, and, in the end, that was what took her out of the moment.

The scent brought with it the memory of the two suits in the workshop, and of Helena’s face as she presented the two time machines that she wanted to use to save her daughter from being murdered over a hundred years ago. 

Myka blinked and pulled back. 

H.G. Wells looked up at her. 

Myka blinked again. Helena – still the same woman she’d met in an office atop a skyscraper three months ago – looked up at her, but it was not only her former boss, not only one of the most beautiful and erudite and charming women Myka had ever met, but also-

Myka closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said thickly. Her lips still tingled and pulsed, her blood still rushed in her ears, but she couldn’t go on. “I… I want you to know that it’s not that I don’t want to, I…” she opened her eyes again and was grateful to see that while Helena looked puzzled, she didn’t seem to be angry or upset at Myka pulling back. “When I said I still needed to process this, _this_ ,” she gestured between the two of them, “is part of it. And I… I don’t feel comfortable continuing… this,” she said and blushed, “while I’m still figuring out…” she cast around, trying to find words. 

“What to make of me?” Helena suggested. 

“You, my feelings for you, your whole story, this... this kissing you thing,” again, Myka gestured. 

Helena’s eyebrows rose. “Is it a problem that I am a woman?” she asked, sounding honestly surprised. 

“No!” Myka replied quickly. “No, not at all.” She shook her head, glad at how Helena reacted to that new piece of information with an immediate smile. “No, I’ve known that I’m pan for a long time.”

“Pan,” Helena repeated musingly, and all of a sudden Myka was really, really tempted to start kissing her again. 

“As in pansexual, or panromantic,” Myka elaborated. “Meaning I’m attracted to people independently of their gender,” she explained, glad to be on firmer ground now. “I really don’t care if someone’s male or female or something in between or none of that at all or whatever. When I get attracted to someone, it’s not about their gender for me, at all.”

Helena was nodding along. “I see,” she said. “Something in between or none of that at all,” she repeated with a smile. “So has general society started to accept the fact that there is more to sex and gender than just male and female?”

“I don’t know about general society,” Myka said with a resigned sigh. “Not sure about that at all. Science has, yes, and most of the gay community too. I’m using gay as an umbrella term here, by the way, not just men who love men, but everyone who’s not straight. Or cis. Cisgender, I mean.”

Again, Helena tried out the word. “Cisgender – the opposite being transgender? As in, someone beyond the concept of gender?”

Again, Myka nodded. “Broadly speaking, yes. It’s being discussed a lot right now, though, and as someone who’s cis and doesn’t follow the discussion very closely, best look into it for yourself instead of just taking my word.”

Again, Helena smiled. “Give me a moment to make a note,” she said, “then I’d like to return to the original topic of our conversation.”

“Sure.” The urge to kiss Helena again wasn’t lessening, but Myka was holding firm. While continuing to kiss Helena seemed like an amazing idea, a marvelous idea, a fantastic idea, it wasn’t a sensible one. It wasn’t one Myka felt comfortable with, like she’d told Helena. She hoped Helena was going to accept that, as they ‘returned to the original topic of their conversation’.

Helena quickly jotted down a few words in one of her ubiquitous notebooks, then turned back around to Myka. “First, let me say that I fully understand your need to figure out where you stand before going further,” she said. “And if that means you’d rather we sleep in separate rooms, I’ll be perfectly happy retiring to one of the guest rooms for the night. I will admit I have trouble sleeping at times, and I wouldn’t want my tossing and turning to rob you of your sleep.”

Myka raised her eyebrows. “Now you have me wondering if you’d have told me that if we hadn’t kissed.”

Helena blushed. “Probably,” she said. “However, I will admit I have wanted to get closer to you for a while now. And so I had high hopes for tonight, and had pushed that particular concern far back in my mind.”

“I see,” Myka chuckled. “Pretty high opinion of yourself too, I see.”

Now it was Helena who raised her eyebrows, looking quite pleased with herself instead of put out for being called out. “I wouldn’t think that that was anything new,” she said. 

Myka laughed out loud. “Not really, no.”

Helena looked up at her. “Oh, I could watch you laugh all day, Myka Bering,” she said quietly but fervently. 

Myka smiled down at her. “And I could watch you puzzle things out all day,” she replied. 

“Well, there will be plenty of occasion for that tomorrow, I hope.” Helena tilted her head. “Until then, what will it be? Us here, or separate bedrooms?”

“I’m willing to give it a try if you are,” Myka said. “I mean, I am tired. Shouldn’t be that hard to keep my hands to myself, considering that we’ll have a big day ahead tomorrow.”

“So sensible,” Helena said teasingly. 

“Someone has to be,” Myka shrugged, but with a grin. 

“You’re quite right,” Helena agreed. “We do make a good team that way.” She laid back flat on the bed. “I shall take my cue from your sensibility, and attempt to get some sleep.”

“Let me know if I’m the one keeping you awake, too,” Myka told her, lying back down too. “Who knows, it might go both ways.” She pulled the sheets up over her chest. They were incredibly soft. “I’ve never slept in silk sheets before,” she said. 

“I’d wager you’ve also never been in a bed with H.G. Wells quite like this before,” Helena said with a small chuckle. 

Myka groaned. “Don’t make it worse,” she said. 

“I do beg your pardon,” Helena replied immediately, sounding very contrite indeed. “Making this difficult for you is the last think I’d want. Is there any way in which I could help? Are there questions you’d like to ask me?”

Myka immediately thought of one, but – tomorrow. The whole ‘why are you a secret vigilante’ thing didn’t really fit right now, did it. “No,” she said. “I mean I do have questions, but right now is not the right time for them, I think. I want to do some more thinking before I ask them. Is that okay?”

“Of course.” Helena reached out to the bedside table, then hesitated. “Is it alright for me to turn off the light?”

“Sure,” Myka replied, and turned hers off, too. The room’s blackness wasn’t full; some light still trickled in from the windows, where the curtains didn’t fully shut out the moon. And there was- “A nightlight?”

“M-hm,” Helena said affirmatively. For the first time, Myka thought she heard something like self-consciousness in the other woman’s voice. “I cannot _abide_ pitch darkness,” Helena said after a moment. Her voice was tense. “It reminds me of the time my mind was suspended. And of Afghanistan, too.”

“Oh.” Myka ran cold as she tried to imagine how that must have felt. “That… yeah, I get that. Don’t worry about the nightlight,” she added. “I can sleep in pretty much any conditions.”

“Good,” Helena said emphatically. Her hand reached out for Myka’s and squeezed it briefly. “Good.”

Myka squeezed back and half expected Helena to withdraw her hand, but it stayed where it was. For a moment, Myka debated pointing that out to her, but, she reasoned, Helena had to know what she was doing, didn’t she? You might accidentally touch someone’s hand, but to hold it and not let it go, that didn’t just happen, right? 

Helena’s fingers were warm and slightly dry. Myka could feel the calluses on the other woman’s fingers, the slight roughness of a scabbed scratch on the back of her hand. 

Helena drew a slightly uneven breath, and Myka stopped moving her fingers, again expecting the hand to be withdrawn. Again, it stayed. All that happened was that Helena moved her fingers slightly to fit them more snugly into Myka’s hand. Then she squeezed again, and fell still.

Myka lay in the darkness trying to make sense of everything that had happened. Her thoughts raced, and her heart was beating fast. She had just kissed a woman she felt attracted to on multiple levels, after all. And it had been a good kiss – an excellent kiss, in fact. 

There was no question that Myka wanted to kiss Helena some more. Do more stuff than kissing too – but how much more would be welcome? Helena had – well, not hinted, she’d downright said she wanted Myka in her life in whatever capacity or form Myka was okay with, and that definitely sounded like ‘more stuff than kissing’. But when? How? And what would happen tomorrow if Helena failed at her task? For that matter, what would happen if she didn’t, and brought her daughter not only back to life, but back to the future with her? Did Myka want to continue this even if it meant sharing Helena with her daughter? Was Helena even thinking that far yet, when she said ‘have you in my life’ – wouldn’t she have said ‘our lives’ in that case?

And while part of Myka pondered all of these things, another part of her was thinking, couldn’t help thinking, of Sam. 

It wasn’t so much that she still felt in love with him or connected to him; it was fear, Myka suddenly realized. From the moment she’d had her fingers on Helena’s pulse in the car after Helena’s return from Afghanistan, she’d felt the fear of losing her, like she’d lost Sam. 

_You can’t cheat physics,_ she told herself. What if the suit didn’t work the way Helena intended – what would happen? Would it simply not do anything – or would the results be-

Myka stopped that thought right there. If anything, nothing would happen. That was it. Just nothing. Helena would be frustrated, probably even devastated, but she’d be alive, and frustration and devastation were things that an alive person could overcome. With the help of someone distracting, perhaps? 

Another part of her brain wanted to tell her something. Myka quietened her thoughts and listened. 

Helena was crying. Now that Myka was paying attention, she recognized the too measured breaths, the tension in the air. Myka’s musings on Sam and on any possible results of tomorrow’s experiments faded into the background as she concentrated on the warmth of Helena’s hand in hers. 

She stroked the back of Helena’s fingers lightly with her thumb. For a moment, Helena’s breath stopped entirely. When it came back, it was with a shudder and a barely suppressed sob. 

“Hey, um,” Myka said softly, “do you… do you want a hug, maybe?” She wasn’t sure if acknowledging Helena’s crying was the best way to deal with this, much less addressing it head-on, and when Helena didn’t reply, her worry slowly started to congeal in her insides. 

Then, there was a small rustle, a sniff, and a clearing of a throat. “If you… if you would be so kind,” Helena said quietly. “However,” she added, stopping Myka in the very act of moving, “fair warning. My tears are over your kindness already – more of the same will, in all probability, bring about more crying.”

Myka furrowed her brow. “You’re crying because I’m kind to you?” she asked in confusion. 

Helena made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. “Is that so hard to believe?” Her voice sounded… lonely, Myka suddenly realized. 

Helena was lonely. She was not just someone who’d left her friends and family behind in a different country an ocean away – she was fully out of her time, out of reach of anyone she used to hold dear. No family at all, no friends, no connections, no tethers. Myka gasped quietly as the full scope of just how utterly alone Helena must feel grew on her. 

“Hey,” she said, without the least bit of hesitation, “here. Come here.” She scooted closer to Helena, and, with a sudden low, urgent little cry in the back of her throat, Helena met her halfway – not for a kiss this time, but for the creature comfort of kindness, of being held and consoled, of being not alone in the dark. “I’m here,” Myka reassured Helena, and felt fingers tighten into a fist at her back. “I know,” she told her, and heard Helena sob in return. “It’s okay,” she said, and meant it.


	11. Chapter 11

Myka woke up flat on her back, with a warm weight against her side. The sky behind the curtains was bright; surely it was a good while past sunrise. She blinked the last bits of sleep from her eyes and looked down. Helena was tucked against her, back snuggled into Myka’s side, knees and arms pulled towards her chest. Myka’s arm was under Helena’s neck, curled protectively around Helena’s arms. If Myka rolled over onto her side, she’d effectively be spooning Helena – but she’d also be waking her up, and that was the last thing she wanted. 

It had been a few days since Leena had told Myka that Helena got, at most, four hours of sleep at night, but Myka had no reason to believe that had changed recently. Until today, that was. Myka wasn’t exactly sure how late it was, but Helena had fallen asleep around midnight and Myka not much later. And it was at least seven now, judging by the sky. 

There was a small noise and an equally small movement at Myka’s side. Part of her was sad – she’d have wished for Helena to get even more sleep, and would have gladly watched over it for a couple hours – but part of her pointed out that, once awake, it was highly probable that Helena would begrudge any amount of sleep she’d gotten, since it meant she hadn’t been working on testing the time traveling capabilities of her suits. 

Myka suppressed a sigh. It couldn’t be a healthy way of dealing with grief, to obsess about changing the cause of said grief. On the other hand – who if not the actual H.G. Wells might be able to pull that off? 

But did that make it any healthier? 

People grieved in their own way, Myka knew that. Some truisms were truisms because they were, well, true. Who was she to judge which path Helena chose? If this… focus helped her come to terms with it, by exhausting every possibility of changing the past, it might help her accept the present. And if she actually succeeded…

Well, then Helena would have her daughter back with her. 

Myka couldn’t see anything faulty with that. Time travel scenarios in various novels invariably insisted that changing the past was wrong; but all Helena would be doing was changing the nature of Christina’s absence, wouldn’t she? As long as nobody knew-

But among the people included in ‘nobody’ was Helena herself, back in the nineteenth century. Who’d then spend a hundred years in self-imposed limbo.

But who also was in Myka’s arms right now, warm, sleepy, somewhat disheveled – a living, breathing person that Myka-

That Myka was in love with. 

Myka blinked as the realization hit her. Then she rolled her eyes at herself for having been too dense to realize it before. 

As if she’d sensed it, Helena moved slightly at Myka’s side, snuggling closer as if seeking Myka’s warmth. 

That probably meant she was getting close to waking up anyway, Myka reasoned. So she probably wouldn’t mind if Myka _did_ turn over and spooned her. And so Myka did exactly that, wincing a little as her ribs and shoulders protested.

Helena sighed and scooted yet closer as Myka’s arm enveloped her. Her next breath was a yawn, and it was followed by a rounded-back stretch so intense it shook her whole body at the finish. Then, “Good morning,” she said, grasping Myka’s hands to pull the embrace closer. 

“Good morning,” Myka replied with a smile. Sleepy, content Helena was delightful. “Did you sleep well?”

Helena hummed a yes, followed by a low chuckle. “Better than I have in a century,” she said wonderingly. Then her body tensed. “What time is it?”

“No idea,” Myka said. “My phone is-”

But Helena was already reaching forward to retrieve her wristwatch. “Seven twenty-two?” she exclaimed, nudging Myka’s arms aside and sitting up. She stared down at Myka with a look of such outraged bafflement on her face that Myka couldn’t help but laugh. 

“That is pretty early for a Sunday, if you ask me,” she said in an attempt to defuse the situation she was sure was heading towards her. 

“That’s _hours_ we’ve lost,” Helena all but wailed. 

“Hey,” Myka said, sitting up. “No, it’s not. It’s hours of sleep you’ve _gained_. I’m pretty sure your body needed them.” When Helena scoffed, Myka leaned forwards and cupped her face with one hand. “No, seriously,” she said. Up this close, and with Helena having removed her make-up the evening before, the consequences of the last couple of weeks were clear to see. There were dark circles under Helena’s eyes, and even in what little light fell through the curtains, Myka could see how tired Helena still looked. 

Helena twisted her head out of Myka’s hands. “Don’t,” she said roughly. 

“I’m not judging,” Myka replied. “I’m worried. Helena, from the very first time I saw you I thought you were beautiful, and I think so still. Like, right now. And you _also_ look desperately tired. Like you could sleep for a week and your body would be just beginning to recover.”

“Yes, yes, yes, and the only reason I haven’t lost more weight is because you were here each night and made me have dinner,” Helena said crossly. She gritted her teeth for a moment, then her shoulders slumped. “Apologies,” she added. “You did not deserve that.”

“It was nothing but the truth,” Myka said.

“Spat at you like an accusation,” Helena insisted. “No, Myka, please – I shall not repay your kindness by jumping down your throat.”

The unexpected colloquialism made Myka chuckle. “Alright,” she said. “How about you repay my kindness by joining me for breakfast?”

“But-” Helena protested, but Myka shook her head. 

“I’m going to have breakfast,” she said, “whether you join me or not. And since I assume you want me around to test your suits, you might as well accompany me to the kitchen. And once you’re _there_ -”

“Oh, alright.” Helena sounded extremely peevish, but a moment later, she rolled her eyes at herself and gave Myka a slightly sheepish smile. “I appreciate your kindness.”

“I know,” Myka said in her best Han Solo imitation. It was only when Helena left for the bathroom that Myka remembered what exactly Han had been saying with those words. And what he’d been replying to.

The protests from Myka’s upper body only got louder as she rolled herself out of bed. She stretched, gingerly, a much as she could, and shook her head as several joints popped and crackled. “Alright then,” she muttered to herself and began to do stretching exercises in earnest. 

“Oh,” Helena said with a pleasantly surprised smile as she returned from the bathroom, “is that ch’i kung?” And without any further ado, she joined Myka in the next exercise. 

“I find it fascinating that this is still practiced,” Helena said after they’d finished. “There are some exercises you do a bit differently from how I learned them; nevertheless – fascinating.”

Myka nodded. Then she voiced a concern that had been growing on her during the exercises. “I, um… I’m going to need something to wear,” she said. “I mean I can wear my pants again, and, um, my bra, but-” 

Helena was already at her wardrobe. “I have a few button-up shirts that should fit you,” she said over her shoulder. “I didn’t offer them to you yesterday because they’re not nightclothes,” she added, pulling a light blue shirt from the rack, “but I really am confident that this will fit you. It is a bit loose on me; it shouldn’t restrict your shoulders overmuch.” She held it out to Myka. “Do you have any preference when it comes to pants? Underpants, I mean?”

Myka blinked. Then she blushed. “Um, just… just plain… just plain ones, I guess? Nothing fancy?”

Helena’s reaction to that was a look that, Myka resolved, Helena should be forbidden by law to give Myka or anyone ever in a situation like this. “I’d bet you would look irresistible in either,” Helena said, in a low voice that raised goosebumps on Myka’s arms. 

“I-” it came out as a squeak, and Myka cleared her throat. “Wouldn’t that be a distraction?” she said desperately. “I mean, a moment ago you were begrudging me breakfast.”

“Ah.” Helena straightened and nodded. “Indeed.” She blinked her eyes a couple of times and exhaled sharply, then nodded again. “Focus,” she said. “Thank you.”

Myka nodded too, thankful that this hurdle had been taken with minimal damage. “Anytime.”

“I’ll set out what you need to get dressed while you’re in the bathroom,” Helena said, all business now. “I’ll see you in the kitchen – any requests for breakfast?”

“Yoghurt and granola, if you have it?”

“It shall be awaiting you,” Helena said. 

-_-_-

Three hours later, Myka was hanging over a bucket, puking her guts out. 

“I’m sorry,” Helena said solicitously, hovering over her. “I don’t know why it’s not _working!_ ” she added bitterly. Myka heard her steps receding, then a resounding thump as, presumably, Helena hit the drawing board once more. Literally. 

Myka wiped off her lips and grabbed a water bottle to rinse out her mouth. She spat, leaned back against the table leg, and said, “Why don’t we take a break. Take a walk, get our minds off this, come back to it in an hour or so.”

“Is that truly your only solution?” Helena snapped, without even turning around. 

Myka shrugged helplessly. “Well, I’m sorry, but I’m not a physicist or engineer or whatever kind of specialist would know more about building a working time machine.”

“That, darling, is glaringly obvious.”

“Stop it.” Myka gritted her teeth. “I’m here to help, not to be patronized.”

“Help, then!” Helena whirled around. 

“I am trying, but you’re not listening,” Myka fired back. Bile was rising again in her throat, and she wasn’t sure if that was another bout of puking from an unsuccessful attempt to travel in time, or just anger at Helena boiling up within her. “Do whatever you want,” she added, “I’m going to take a break.”

“But I need you as a test pi-”

“You can test that suit by yourself for once,” Myka snapped, “see how _you_ like it. Maybe once _you’ve_ puked four times, you’re gonna be ready for a break too.”

“Or maybe I’d be more invested in this endeavor since it’s my child we’re trying to save!”

“That’s it,” Myka said, standing up. “I’m done here. I’m not gonna sit here and listen to talk like that.”

“If this was about saving your beau, you’d be giving this everything you had,” Helena spat at her.

Myka’s blood ran cold. She turned to Helena as if on rails. Slow, screeching, ice-cold rails. “What did you just say.”

“You heard me!”

“I thought you didn’t know what happened,” Myka growled. “You- you brought it up as an example of restraint, that you weren’t asking me about what happened. You knew? You knew the whole time?!”

“Of course I knew,” Helena gave back. “Due diligence – I looked into your background, and the reason why you left the Secret Service wasn’t that hard to find. And I did respect your decision not to talk about it, didn’t I?”

“You-” Myka spluttered, angry beyond belief. “You threw it at me just now! To… to guilt me into staying, into putting in more work, by implying that I didn’t care as much as you did!”

“Well, if you could take this suit and travel back in time and prevent your partner from getting killed, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you suspend anything else, sacrifice anything else, just to see him smile again?” There was a bitter twist around Helena’s mouth, and her voice was tinged with insecurity amongst the anger, but Myka was, by now, too enraged to acknowledge it. 

“No,” she shot back, biting down on the fact that she had thought this very thought only last night, “because I, unlike you, have moved on.”

For a moment, both she and Helena seemed to hold their breaths. Then Helena, eyes burning like black embers, pointed at the door. “Get out,” she snapped.

Myka threw up her arms. “Fine.” She turned on her heel and stormed out of the workshop.


	12. Chapter 12

Myka woke up to too-bright lights and the beeping of a monitor. A moment later, pain asserted itself, making her groan. Her throat was dry, and she coughed. 

“Hang on,” a somewhat familiar male voice said, “let me help you drink.” 

Myka turned her head in the direction his words had come from, and tried to pry her eyes open for long enough to recognize him. He was moving towards her, holding out a glass; she could make out that much. When she tried to raise her arm to take the glass from him, a lance of pain shot through her shoulder and she hissed. 

“Whoa, whoa, stand down, agent.” The voice sounded slightly amused now, though in a gentle way. Steve Jinks, Myka realized. “Your shoulder was dislocated when we found you, probably best not to move it for now. Here, I’ll hold this up for you.” And he raised the glass close to Myka’s face; close enough that she could see the straw sticking up from it. 

She drank deeply from the cool water while her thoughts started moving at a slightly more than sluggish pace. “Found me?” she asked finally, releasing the straw from her lips. Her throat was still sore and she sounded croaky, but things were beginning to make sense.

Jinks nodded. “You were in an accident,” he said. “Crashed your car near Brookside Canyon. Either you got extremely lucky or, if you did what you did on purpose to keep your car from crashing actually _into_ the canyon, you should consider opening a stunt driving school. Definitely lucky that we were keeping tabs on you – the agent on duty called for an airlift immediately; that’s why and how you’re here.” He gestured around the room. “SHIELD premises, hospital wing,” he elaborated. “Got a dislocated shoulder, couple cracked ribs, probably one hell of a headache too.”

Myka nodded weakly. Her head was throbbing, as was most of her right side. An IV line led to her forearm; probably – _hopefully_ pain meds. An accident – she fought to remember. She’d been in Helena’s workshop all day, testing-

The suits. 

The time machines that didn’t work.

The row.

And then she’d left and, not five miles away, crashed her car badly enough that the agent had called for a- hang on. “You’re keeping tabs on me?” 

Jinks nodded again. “With good reason,” he added. He turned, grabbed a newspaper from a side table, and held up the headline for Myka to see. 

She blinked and willed her eyes to focus enough to read the huge letters. “Wells CEO-” she frowned. The headline didn’t make sense. “-dies in crash?!” It spanned the whole page. There was a grainy picture of a car at the bottom of a canyon underneath it, just as wide. “What the-”

“Someone is pushing an agenda,” Jinks said. “That is not where your car was when we got you from it, and you very clearly aren’t dead.”

“Thanks,” Myka said absentmindedly. “Why would the Daily run a headline like that without verifying it?” She willed her thoughts to turn faster. “Why would Artie-” and then her thoughts ran ice-cold. “Helena,” she gasped. She half-sat up, despite protestations from her body and from Agent Steve Jinks. “Does Helena know I’m… here?” ‘Alive’ sounded too dramatic, but essentially, that is what Myka wanted, needed to know.

Jinks shook his head, clearly alarmed by the vehemence of Myka’s reaction. “We haven’t been able to reach her, but that’s nothing new, is it?”

“No, but-” Myka tried again to sit up and growled a curse when every fiber in her body screamed out in complaint. “I need to get to her,” she said urgently. “She… she wasn’t in a good place when I left her yesterday,” she tried to explain. “If she thinks I’m dead, I… she…”

Before she could find a suitably diplomatic way of telling Agent Jinks that she was afraid that her death might drive Helena George Wells fully round the bend, there was a knock on the door. 

“Yes?” she called out.

A frazzled-looking young man looked in. “Agent Jinks,” he said, “we need you in the situation room.”

“Does this situation have anything to do with Helena Wells?” Myka asked. She had a bad feeling about the whole situation, and when the man hesitated, it grew. “It does, doesn’t it? Help me up,” she told Jinks, then, to the other man, she said, “You, get me a wheelchair. Now!”

The man looked at Jinks for guidance and left only when Jinks nodded. Jinks wasn’t too happy about the development; Myka could see that, but she didn’t have the time – she didn’t have the leisure – to worry about that right now. 

Her left arm was less than useless; it was a nuisance. She had to ask Agent Jinks to help her put on clothes – dark grey fatigues with the SHIELD logo that he pulled from a cupboard opposite the bed. When the other agent returned with the wheelchair, Jinks took him aside and murmured something in his ear; moments after Jinks had finished helping Myka into the wheelchair, the other agent returned with a sling for her arm. 

“Thanks, Agent-” Myka left the sentence hanging expectantly. 

“Napier, ma’am; Liam Napier,” he said, blushing slightly. “You’re welcome.”

She nodded. “Can you get Arthur Nielsen on the phone for me?” she asked while Jinks helped her wrap her arm in the sling.

“We’ve been trying to,” he said, “but his line is busy.”

“Of course.” Myka resisted the urge to smack her forehead with her right hand – her headache was bad enough as it was. “D’you got my phone?” Jinks produced it and held it out to her. She took it and unlocked it, then handed it to Napier. “There’s an additional number in here for him; try that one, it might not be as busy. Tell him the giraffe wants to speak to him.” You could almost hear the sound of two jaws hitting the floor. Myka rolled her eyes. “That’s my codename. Do not, under pain of… of _pain_ , repeat this to anyone else.” She looked at Jinks and added, “Or I’ll have to kill you.”

“Understood,” Napier said, almost dropping the phone as she handed it to him. “I’ll let you know the moment I have him on the line.”

“Good,” Myka said, then turned back to Jinks, who was smiling slightly. “What?” she asked, narrowing her eyes. 

“Once you have it, you don’t lose it, am I right?” he gave back. “I heard you were a good agent.”

Myka pursed her lips. “Are we going to go to the situation room or not, Agent Jinks?” She knew she still was a good agent. She hadn’t left the Service because she’d been a bad agent. He probably knew this. She tried not to scowl as he pushed her through the hallways of wherever-they-were, but people scooted out of their way fast enough that she was pretty sure she was, in fact, scowling.

The situation room was chaos – but controlled chaos. Myka tried to parse it as quickly as she could – here were the TV monitors, there the radio monitors, over _there_ a woman in a blue uniform next to her a man in fatigues; liaisons to the police department and Armed Forces, respectively. A black woman with a tight braided hairdo and a powder-pink skirt suit turned around as they entered. She was very obviously the calm at the center of the chaos.

“Ms. Bering, Agent Jinks. Good,” she said, motioning them towards a table off-center. “The situation is grave.” She gestured to the monitors on the left hand wall. 

Myka saw a somewhat familiar vista of mountains, covered in forests, meadows dotted with lakes. She frowned and looked further; there was a figure in the center, barely more than an inch tall in the distance, surrounded by fire, explosions even. The dread in her stomach solidified. 

“Yellowstone,” the woman intoned. “Wells arrived there about fifteen minutes ago. She flew circles around the terrain for seven minutes, then landed in this spot and started shooting lasers at the ground.”

“Plasma exhaust,” Myka corrected immediately and without thinking. So these people, SHIELD, whatever that was, knew about Helena being the person in the suit. That at least was for certain now.

The woman narrowed her eyes at her. “Thanks for clearing that up, Ms. Bering.” She flicked her fingers towards an aide, who jumped to her side immediately. “Plasma exhaust,” she snapped. “Put that in the equations.” Then, turning back to Myka, she added, “Any more details you can give us?”

Myka rattled off the specs that she remembered. The aide jotted them down and, after another sign from the black woman, sped off. “Who are you?” Myka asked the woman at that point. 

“They call me Mrs. F,” the woman said. 

“Most of us think it stands for Fury,” Jinks stage-whispered at Myka’s side. 

Mrs. F’s lips thinned into almost a smile. “I run SHIELD,” she said, disregarding Jinks’ comment. “Have you had any chance to look through the proposal Agent Jinks left with you?”

Myka shook her head. “We were busy doing other things.”

“Like building a weaponized space suit,” Mrs. F nodded. She took a deep breath. “Plasma exhaust,” she muttered. Myka wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a string of expletives come from her mouth next, even though her exterior seemed far too bourgeois for it. But Mrs. F simply shook her head. “Valda,” she snapped at a man who was already hurrying towards her. “Results?”

Valda, a slender, middle-aged man, was pale as he approached. “Looking rather dire,” he said. He spoke with a British inflection, which Myka thought of as odd but dismissed as probably not important. “With those new specs, forecast has really gone south. We’re now looking at ninety minutes or less.”

“For what?” Myka asked. 

Valda looked at Mrs. F with his head tilted in obvious question. When Mrs. F nodded impatiently, he told Myka, “She’s firing at the ground in sustained bursts. We think she’s trying to set off the Yellowstone super caldera for some reason.”

The dread in Myka’s stomach lurched. “Set off-” she broke off and inhaled sharply through her nose to stop the nausea. “That would be cataclysmic,” she said.

“A civilization ending event,” Valda confirmed, sounding calmer than he had any rights to. 

“Countermeasures?” Myka asked him. 

Again, he looked at Mrs. F; again, he received a nod. “Fighter jets are preparing to launch from Mahlstrom and Mountain Home Air Force Bases; they’ll deploy in-” he glanced at one of many digital clocks at the far wall, “under five minutes. They have permission to shoot to kill.”

“Anything else?”

Valda shook his head.

Myka gritted her teeth. “Has anyone even _tried_ to speak to her?”

“Oh that,” he said with a shrug, as if it was an afterthought. “She was going on about how mankind was a pest, that sort of thing.”

Myka felt nauseated. She felt faint. She felt the beginnings of panic trying to get a grip on her. She clenched her teeth harder, fighting back. _Inhale, exhale. Think._

The suit was built to be bullet-proof; Helena had boasted of that and the tabloid article had mentioned it too. But up to which caliber? And what about explosive ammunition? 

How could Myka get there fast enough to get to Helena before the fighter jets did? 

Short answer, she couldn’t. 

_So find a long answer. Make it work.  
_  
She looked at Mrs. F. “Helena is doing this because she thinks I’m dead,” she said. It sounded ridiculous even to her own ears, so she amended it with, “at least that’s a factor. If I can get to her, show her she’s wrong about that part, I’m positive I can get her to stop.”

Mrs. F gave her a look so intense she seemed to read every single thought in Myka’s brain. Then she nodded. “Lieutenant,” she called over to the man in fatigues. “Have the fighter jets wait. We’ll try her approach first.”

“But-” Valda began.

“Ninety minutes,” Mrs. F snapped at him. “Time enough to try for a non-bloody solution, don’t you think?”

“We’ll be seeing the first earthquakes in an hour,” he warned.

“All the more reason to get going.” She turned to Myka. “Get ready, Ms. Bering, we’ll fly you in.”

Myka shook her head and pushed herself to stand, willed herself to not collapse back into the wheelchair as pain once more shot through her. “I’ll fly myself,” she said with gritted teeth. “Just get me to Rainbow Cove.”

Mrs. F raised her eyebrows. 

“There are two suits,” Myka explained. It had only occurred to her a moment ago, but when it had, she’d known that this was the way to go. The suits could communicate with each other; it was the fastest way for Helena to recognize her. 

As if Mrs. F had seen Myka’s line of reasoning in her eyes, she nodded.

-_-_-

“We are fifteen miles from our destination,” CATURANGA intoned in Myka’s ear piece.

“Try reaching her again,” Myka said.

“I will,” came the reply. “Might I also suggest starting to slow down? The suits are designed to cushion gravitational forces as you brake, but can only do so up to a certain degree.”

“Understood,” Myka said grudgingly. “Do that, then.”

“I will,” he replied again. Then, “I’m afraid I’m unable to reach Ms. Wells.”

“Give me mission control, then, or whoever’s in charge here.”

There was a moment of silence, then a radio line crackled open in Myka’s ear piece. “Blue Steel, we’re receiving you,” said a female voice. 

Myka gritted her teeth at the call sign. Yes, it was descriptive, yes, it was a useful shorthand, but that didn’t mean she had to like it, did it? “What’s the situation?”

“We’ve set up observation spots at a one-mile perimeter,” the woman replied. “Green Steel is still shooting at the ground. She’s hovering in the air now, thirty feet above the developing crater.”

“Understood. Let your observers know I’m approaching; I don’t need any interference from them.”

“Roger that.”

“Blue Steel out. CATURANGA, any news on reaching Helena?”

“I’m afraid not, Ms. Bering,” the AI said. “We might have better luck once line-of-sight is established.”

“Keep at it.”

“Of course.”

Myka could feel the suit decelerating now. Part of her wanted to counteract it, wanted to get to Helena as fast as she possibly could, but CATURANGA’s warning made sense. It wouldn’t do anyone any good if g-forces made her pass out as she approached. 

“We are within range of my sensors,” CATURANGA announced.

“Show me.”

The display changed to a rough 3D approximation of what Myka had seen in the situation room. In the center, a green dot hovered over a crater of boiling rock. Temperature readings off on one side of the display were in the upper eight hundred degrees and rising. Below them, a countdown was at seventeen minutes and fifty-two seconds – estimated time until caldera ignition. Underneath that, another countdown was at seven and a half minutes – time until the planes arrived. They were cutting it closer than even Valda’s best projections had calculated, but Myka took it as a good sign that control hadn’t told her to abort; Mrs. F was obviously holding out for her.

“We’re coming in at Helena’s half past eight,” Myka realized as she looked at the display. “She’ll be able to see us. Good.” Then she frowned as she realized something else – Helena wouldn’t see _her_ , not as such. Her head was encased in a helmet just like Myka’s was. “She’ll see an icon, right?” she asked CATURANGA with a sinking feeling. “Not a silver-blue armor suit.”

“That is correct,” CATURANGA replied. 

Myka groaned. 

“Which is why I’m constantly transmitting our ID,” the AI went on. “It should show up on her display next to the icon that represents us.”

“ _Should?_ ” 

“It is difficult to judge how much damage the other suit’s sensors and processors have taken from the heat that they are being exposed to,” CATURANGA replied. “It was never built to sustain anything like this.”

Myka gritted her teeth as she contemplated this. “I’m gonna need more than that,” she said. “I’m gonna need her to recognize me someho-”

“Warning,” CATURANGA interrupted her. A red streak appeared on the display, coming in fast, followed by a second one about two feet to the left of the first.

“What? Evade!” Myka tried tilting to her right and up, but she was too slow. Something hit her, striking her right shoulder with the force of a sledgehammer. “Steady,” Myka shouted as the suit spiraled fast enough to make her nauseous. “CATURANGA, steady the suit!! We don’t wanna hit that second blast!”

“I’m working on-”

Too late. Myka’s suit bucked and twisted, and she went down. 

The crash seemed to last an hour, of tumbling, hitting the ground, bouncing, sliding, bouncing again, slowing only incrementally each time until she finally slid to a stop. 

“Fuck,” she breathed, with feeling. Her left arm hurt like hell, and while the suit, again, had borne the brunt of the impact, she _had_ just been in a car accident last night. She still ached – she ached again. Everything hurt. “What _was_ that?!” 

“Plasma residue,” CATURANGA replied equanimously. 

Myka groaned. “She must have seen me as a hostile,” she muttered to herself, then added, more loudly, “Status?”

“I am about to finish my analysis,” the AI said. “Give me a moment.” Then, the display lit up with a graphic representation of the suit, detailing the diagnoses. “Propulsion systems are still intact, as well as the suit’s overall structural integrity.”

Myka was impressed. “Sturdy build.”

“Thank you, Ms. Bering. I’m afraid the communications array and most external sensors are damaged, though.”

“Comms?” Myka groaned again. “The comms are down?”

“It would appear that way,” CATURANGA replied. 

“So you won’t be able to transmit to her that we’re us? Or reach her on an audio connection? Or mission control?”

“True on all counts, I have to say.”

“Any chance I can repair them real quick?”

“Out here with what we have at hand, I’m afraid not.”

Myka resisted the urge to slap the ground, hard. She swore instead. “Is the countdown still up?”

“Indeed it is,” the AI said, and added it to the display. Fifteen minutes till ignition, four and a half till the fighter jets were here.

“And propulsion still works?”

“It does.”

“How many hits like these can the suit sustain?”

“At this distance,” CATURANGA said, “three, potentially four. As we get closer, fewer than that.”

Again, Myka muttered a curse. “She must’ve just seen a dot approaching, and blew it out of the sky.”

“That would appear to be the case.”

“So how can I make sure she knows it’s me?” Myka felt like screaming, but she had to stay calm. This was about stopping a cataclysm, about saving millions if not more lives – Helena’s among them.

“A flight pattern or path that she would recognize, perhaps?”

“No idea what that would be,” Myka said. “I mean I can’t very well fly an M O B just to catch her attention; we don’t have the time.”

“Propulsion in Morse code?”

“Same problem.” The Earth shook under them. “Earthquakes.” Myka muttered another curse. “I need to stop her, now.” A thought had been growing in the back of her mind. Up until now, she’d ignored it, but she was running out of options. “CATURANGA, what happens if the arc reactor in this suit is hit by a sustained blast of plasma exhaust?”

“The reactor itself is very well insulated, as you know,” the AI replied. “However, the insulation was not designed to act as a shield against prolonged exposure.”

“And just how long is prolonged?” Myka asked, trying to stay patient.

“My estimate would be two point one seconds at the level Ms. Wells is currently putting out. After that, it will overload, resulting in an explosion.”

Myka felt queasy – but she was running out of choices. Her suit wasn’t weaponized, after all. There wasn’t much she could do. “I hope she’s gonna stop herself in time, then,” she said grimly.

The Earth jerked more violently under Myka, and she gritted her teeth. She had to get going. “If my suit exploded – would that be enough to take out _her_ suit? Her reactor? Her weapons at least?”

“Depending on distance and-,”

“Yes or no, CATURANGA?”

“There is an eighty-five percent chance that a close enough explosion would hit her arc reactor in such a way to shut it down, or cause it to explode in turn.” 

So, ideally no one dead, second-best chance one dead, third-best chance two dead. “I’ll take that,” Myka said grimly. “Here’s what we’ll do. You’re gonna need to control the suit; this’ll all happen too fast for me to react in time, and if I’m right about the acceleration power of this suit, I’ll probably be unconscious from the g-forces anyway.”

-_-_-

What the observers observed a moment later, was this:

Blue Steel rose from the spot she’d crashed at an impossible angle and impossible speed. The replay needed to be slowed to even make out what was happening. Blue Steel approached Green Steel at a considerable fraction of Mach velocity, decelerating only at the very last fraction of a second to a speed that, while it still tackled Green Steel out of the sky, didn’t snap Green Steel’s neck. Green Steel was impacted from the left, and her plasma blast tilted up at the impact, veering across the landscape, then hitting Blue Steel full-on for half a second. A moment after the plasma beam winked out, there was an explosion, and Green Steel was thrown clear of the crater – of Blue Steel, though, nothing remained.


	13. End Credits Bonus Scene

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for staying in your seats during the end credits! Here's your little bonus scene!

Everything was dark, and everything hurt – again. Myka winced. “Ow,” she said with feeling. 

“Hello?” came a voice from somewhere in the distance. It sounded British – and young. A girl? Maybe a boy?

But that didn’t make sense.

“What the-” There was something sticky on her face, and Myka stopped talking, trying very hard not to think too closely about what that sticky stuff might be. Instead, she tried to turn her head, but she couldn’t move an inch. 

The suit. She was in the suit, and the suit was dead. Sitting more or less upright, like a rag doll leaning limply against a dollhouse chair, head lolling back to stare at the imaginary dollhouse’s ceiling. All those nice supportive servos – unresponsive. Myka tried to lift her right arm – she wouldn’t even consider moving the left one; her shoulder was a mess of pain. But even her right wouldn’t budge. “CATURANGA, reboot,” she said, hoping against hope that the suit wasn’t quite that dead. Moving her lips meant that her cheeks moved against the stickiness; Myka grimaced in distaste. 

There was no reaction except a further “Hello?”, now a bit closer. 

“CATURANGA, reboot,” Myka said more loudly. Then she remembered the other way to restart the systems, and strained to tap the tip of her right ring finger against the tip of her thumb twice, then the tip of her second finger, three times. It was nowhere near a rhythm, far too uneven for that, but still, it should work. Shouldn’t it?

Nothing. Alright, so she was able to move her fingers, but other than that, nothing. Certainly no booting up. The reactor, she realized. It had to have stopped working.

Myka let her head thunk to the side inside the helmet. “Fuck,” she breathed, with even more feeling. 

“Excuse me?” The voice sounded so close that whoever was speaking was probably no more than a few feet away from her now. Potentially close enough to have heard that last expletive.

“Yes, uh, hi,” Myka said awkwardly. “I’m not a threat,” she added, conscious of how she – or rather, the suit – probably looked. 

“That is quite obvious,” the young person said with an impressive amount of irony in their voice. “Can I help you?”

“Yes please,” Myka said with a grateful sigh. “Are you close enough to reach me safely?”

“Yes.” Myka heard sounds of scrambling – shoes on… wood? Rustling noises, like heavy paper? 

The helmet obscured a lot of sound that, in a functioning suit, micro speakers would relay to the wearer’s ears. No sight, no sound without a functioning computer system – definitely a weakness, Myka reflected. 

“I’m here now,” the voice intoned, and it sounded indeed as if its owner was sitting right next to Myka. 

“If you reach towards the left side of the helmet,” Myka told them, “a little under where my ear would be, right behind the jaw, there’s a small indentation.”

She could feel a hand tugging on her helmet, turning it a little to the right to get better access. “I can feel it,” the child said excitedly. 

“Push it, please,” Myka said. 

The child hesitated. “And what will happen if I do?” they said eventually. 

“Cautious,” Myka said, with begrudging approval, “that’s good.” She took a deep breath, willing herself to be patient and calm. This child was her only hope right now. “What will happen is that my helmet’s front will detach, so I can see your face and you can see mine. If you tap it three times, my suit will open up so that I can get out of it. I really would like that very much,” she added. She felt like a turtle on its back, even though, technically, she supposed she was sitting leaned against something. 

“I see. That doesn’t sound too dangerous,” the kid said, and pushed. 

The helmet’s seal hissed as it released, and the face plate’s closures clicked open. “Thank you,” Myka sighed. “Heads up,” she added then, quickly, because small fingers were working on prying the face plate loose. “I’m probably covered in either sick or blood.”

“Alright,” the child said, sounding supremely unperturbed. The face plate was lifted up, and Myka squinted in the sudden light. “Correction,” the child added. “Vomit _and_ blood.”

Myka exhaled. Her eyes were watering. She tried to blink the tears away to see her savior. Definitely a child, but maybe not that young? Twelve, thirteen? “Hi,” she said belatedly. “I’m Myka.”

“Christina Wells,” the child said, “pleased to meet you.”

Myka’s jaw dropped. She tried to lift herself up to get a closer look at the child’s face, but pain lanced through her left shoulder, and everything turned black.


End file.
